There has been a massive shift from the popularity of one-to-many courses to the desire for community-driven courses. People want to connect with others while trying to improve themselves. They crave connection more than ever and this shift has been incredibly interesting to witness. In this episode, Andy Guttormsen, co-founder and CMO of Circle, joins me to discuss what the future holds for online communities. We’ll cover: The Main Difference Between a Following and a Community How to Start Attracting People to Build a Community Why You Just Need to Be Yourself The Most Effective Way to Onboard People into Your Community The Benefits of Showing Up Consistently Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Smart businesses continuously review and revise their social media marketing strategy based on what’s currently working. Have you ever thought about starting your Instagram page from scratch? Maybe you want to separate your brand and your personal life, or you’re curious if taking a more niche approach can help you reach your core audience. Either way, it’s difficult to know what the results will be without actually taking action and running an experiment. In today’s episode, I’ll walk you through my decision to start a new Instagram page and why I was willing to walk away from 45,000 followers. Tuning in you’ll hear about my Instagram journey, follower growth, and what my findings were from this wild experiment.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Believe it or not, the profit that you make from your first sale to a customer isn’t critical to the success of your business in the long term. Getting paid at all to bring in qualified leads means that you’re doing better than 99% of the people who are marketing their products and services on the internet. Growing an Instagram account or creating content for Reels isn’t necessarily the key to leveraging digital products and getting more qualified leads. If you want more leads or you’re interested in selling and leveraging digital products without getting caught in the weeds of flashy marketing strategies, this is the episode for you! Tuning in, you’ll find out how to attract leads AND get paid in the process.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Today I’m sharing the marketing strategy behind how I made $ 287,000 and had over 10,000 people pay to join my email list from a digital product I created just once. Many entrepreneurs only focus on nurture marketing, taking warm leads and trying to convert them into a signature offer. But that can quickly turn into a situation that has you saying “I need more leads!”  But brand new businesses as well as established businesses need a visibility plan in order to retain customers and keep growing their businesses. And this shouldn’t involve feeling stressed or working over your capacity. The goal of this kind of marketing is to get to know more people, allow them into your world, and earn their trust. That’s how to find your ideal clients and customers! Social media marketing and creating digital products are some of the best ways to do this in 2024.  I’m here to help you grow your business in a way that allows you to still have a life. Tune into today’s podcast to learn more! For show notes of this episode, go to thestrategyhour.com.

I’ve been making digital products for over eight years, and I want to see you succeed with your digital products, too! In this episode, we dig into the digital products I would not create if I were just getting started (and it’s not what you think, so be sure to listen in!) I'll cover: One Thing Almost Everyone Starting Out Does Wrong What the Most Effective Digital Products Are Actually About The Secret Behind My Most Popular Mini-Course Why We Didn’t Give Away Your Business on Autopilot for Free What We’ve Done The Most and Why We’ll Keep Doing It How Integration Became Our Superpower Two Goals to Take You to the Next Level Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

I have observed a need for small business owners to find more leads and I want to talk about why that’s happening and how you can solve this problem. Scaling a business is a numbers game but the problem is, a lot of you have business goals that are confined to what you can do in a limited amount of time – therefore giving your business a growth ceiling. And so many of you want to run a small business, not manage bigger processes!  A lot of people then think that they want to bring in passive income, and that is possible. I am so excited to help you build more hybrid-based businesses where you can attract real clients through a digital offer and then those people will be more primed and ready for the other existing offers that you have.  Today I’m going to share the steps I have taken to revolutionize my business and create consistent growth. I think this will solve ‘the lead problem’ for so many small businesses this year! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

In today's episode, I'm diving into the world of budgeting when your income likes to play hide and seek. Maybe your business revenue and pay are doing the unpredictable tango, and you're itching for more stability in the paycheck department. The economy's a bit wild right now, so what I'm sharing is my playbook for a more conservative approach in these uncertain times. Trust me, this is the game-changer for tweaking your business finances, setting up a cozy personal financial vibe, and securing the long-term health of your hustle. Think of it as the secret sauce to keeping your business doors wide open for the long haul! Oh, and let's kick that idea out of your noggin that businesses grow all neat and tidy, either linear or exponential. Nope, it's more like a rollercoaster ride. Don't stress if things seem a bit wonky—that's just the nature of the business beast. I've been there, done that, and I'm here to help you ride those waves of inconsistency like a pro. Now, I'm not promising to smooth out every bump; bumps happen! But what we're aiming for is to sprinkle a bit of predictability into your personal financial future. So buckle up, and let's get ready to surf the unpredictability that's bound to show up! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

If you are looking for inspiration for how you can go from small-town to the big leagues, this is the episode for you! Today we are joined by celebrity makeup artist, Harriet Hadfield. While working with celebrities such as Doja Cat, Naomi Watts, and Olivia Rodrigo, Harry has made it her mission to empower creative freelancers to step into the role of CEO. Today we are digging into how she got all of her clients as a freelancer while showing up in the world the way she wants to, as a neurodivergent creative. Harry always wanted to be the kid who did everything and knew that she wanted to be a makeup artist at a very young age when she went ‘all in’ on honing her craft. In this episode, we hear all about how she started training in makeup and handled being the black sheep of the family as so many creatives are. We dive into Harry’s advice for creatives starting a personal brand, how to find your niche, use social media to your advantage, and so much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

I've got a pretty personal tale to spill today—a deep dive into the crisis I faced back in 2022 and how it flipped my world. So, picture this: I'm cruising through life, and bam! I hit a moment where I realize I'm the same age my mom was during her brain surgery three decades ago. Cue the existential crisis! In today’s podcast, I'm laying it all out, sharing my self-reflection journey, and tossing in some cool insights and exercises I picked up along the way. I hope these tools help you move through your own self-reflection and transformation and help you pinpoint what's important to you so you can prioritize those things going forward. Treat this episode like your trusty compass for navigating the sometimes choppy seas of self-discovery!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Today on the podcast we’re chatting about your journey ahead—whether you've got a clear vision or you're still figuring it out. I get it, some of you might be like, "Where am I even headed?" And you know what? That's totally cool! It's super easy to breeze past the gold mine of your past experiences, but guess what? They've shaped you into the awesome person you are, and they're like breadcrumbs leading you to your destination. So, if you're not sure about the destination, no worries! It's not about having all the answers; it's about springboarding off from here. Even those random jobs you had? They're like building blocks for the business you're rocking today! Now, the big question is, how does your past play into your future plans? Whether it's those epic moments or the tiny ones, they can be a game-changer for what comes next. So, how do we make the most of it? Let me tell you, it's not about zooming through things; it's about finding your pace! That's why I cooked up the PACE method, and today, I'm spilling the beans on how these nuggets can help you turn your discoveries into real, actionable stuff by breaking down PACE!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

On today’s podcast I’m sharing best practices for tailoring your marketing strategy based on your business model. It doesn’t matter if your business serves customers in a one-to-one, one-to-many, or even a hybrid model. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketing plan, and at the end of the day, you have to market your business in a way that works best for YOU. We’ll also talk about finding the proper niche, and Identifying exactly what types of customers you’re trying to attract. Online audiences have changed quite a bit, and we’ll talk about how and why. Staying visible and nurturing leads is dependent on your audience, and I’m sharing advice on what next steps you should take to stay visible and relevant. Tune in to learn what you need to know today about the future of marketing for your online business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Inevitably, you’re going to encounter people who simply don’t think the same way you do. Personally, it took me a long time to understand this. I always assumed that everyone problem-solved the same way, thought the same way, and came up with ideas in the same way. Like me, you might be surprised to learn that not everyone experiences inner dialogue in the same way or even at all! In fact, it’s estimated that 30 to 50% of people don’t have an “inner voice.” Those without verbal thoughts may think abstractly or use visual imagery instead. It's important to note that there is no right or wrong way to think, and both styles have their pros and cons. Today, I’m joined by my husband Jared, who doesn’t have an inner monologue, to find out how he processes his thoughts and emotions without all the self-talk. We also explore how you can grow your relationship by learning about someone else’s communication methods, find opportunities for creativity with different thinking styles, and more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Some of you are mulling over the question of what business to start. Others are just nosy and want to know how I would do it if I had the chance to start again. Which of your million-and-one ideas should you pursue? Where do you focus your time and energy? How niche do you go? Should you sell your offer as a service, a digital product, a course, or a membership? We answer all of these questions and more in today’s episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Today on the podcast, I have Jess Cervellon, former VP of Customer Experience at 100 million dollar chocolate venture, Feastables, where she has been laser-focused on crafting an unforgettable experience. She is also a fractional CMO for creators with millions of followers. We are talking about everything along the way, creating incredible customer experiences, cultivating engagement, creating community, and even how you can leverage opportunities that do good in the world and really have it be an opportunity to create incredible content (with the potential of even going viral).  You are going to love today’s episode! There are a lot of notes. If you are someone who is transitioning out of a corporate role and into your own business, Jess is really going to inspire you with her story. I’m excited for you to dig into today’s episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s natural to reflect on what we truly want and where we would like to go next; to figure out what our plans and aspirations could potentially look like. In that spirit, I want to use today’s conversation to dig into what it looks like to invest in your dream and the things you truly want to pursue. How do you make that happen when there's still so much on your plate, so many areas of your life pulling at you, not to mention the finances required to keep things running? Join me today as I explore what it means to strike that balance and invest in your passion. Because I truly believe your dreams are more available to you than you realize. It’s just about taking the necessary steps to get on the right path!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

I’ve been doing business for long enough to know that the people you love the most aren’t always your biggest supporters. Today, I discuss this slightly unsettling topic and share some advice that will make you feel empowered! I want to provide some insight into why strangers sometimes support you more than the people you actually know and help you see it as an opportunity instead of a source of frustration.  I’m sure you have people in your life who love, support, and cheer you on and others who only “sort of" support you too. Maybe you feel held back, let down, or frustrated by the way they talk about you, your career, or your business. Tuning in, you’ll hear my take on why people aren’t always supportive and how you can manage your expectations, seek support elsewhere, and learn to self-validate! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

2023 has been a whirlwind! This episode is dedicated to the lessons I’ve learned and how I am going to apply them in the future. I want to give you all an opportunity to reflect on your own journey. How did this year go for you? What does next year look like?  Today, I’m going to talk about 23 things I learned this year, two of which I will never do again! I’m usually a never-say-never person, but I’m pretty confident I won’t be doing these again. The 23 lessons I am sharing today are things that come from my personal experience inside Boss Project, things I’ve observed with clients, things I’ve gone through and challenges I’ve been through, exciting things I’m leaning into this year, and things that will get you thinking about your own take on all these things! Let’s dive in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

During this episode, I want to dive into what it’s really like to deal with stress and anxiety while you are building a business. How do you continue to be productive? How do you build a support team and a structure that will allow you to move forward even when you are struggling with your mental health? It is okay to not be okay all the time! You can still be an incredibly successful person who figures out to manage and cope, and still has bad days.  This episode comes with a disclaimer that I am not a medical professional. If you are in crisis, there is a suicide and crisis hotline in the United States. You can dial 988 on your phone and get someone on the line to help. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

I have been so emotional thinking about recording this episode because it is such a massive milestone! This is episode 800 of the Strategy Hour Podcast and it has had so much success. I just want to thank all of you for your continued support because it means the world. I am so grateful for the community that we have created that can come together and create powerful things. It only makes sense that on such a huge episode, I share something that is so monumental! This is the day I’m supposed to make this announcement.  From the ground up, my team and I have completely rebuilt the Creative Template Shop. I mean literally all of it was changed in some way or another and it was such a massive project for our team! There are some aspects of the site that have changed and you may not even notice those things which is just so incredible to me because that is what truly good design is about! These things are going to make so much sense to you without me even needing to explain them. So much thought went into making this possible. I am so proud of the work that went into this. There have been so many changes and we did it with only five people. I am so excited for you to experience it!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

I’ve spent years sharing what it’s like to build a business online, but I haven’t shared much about what it’s like to build a million-dollar membership. Today, I’m answering all your burning questions from logistics to evolution, plus some of my biggest tips and tricks, the things I could never have predicted, and more. We’re diving into all of it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Believe it or not, we are rapidly approaching the end of 2023. You’re probably thinking, how the heck did we get here?! You’re probably considering how you can wrap up the old year and start the new year fresh. You’re also probably wondering: what should I be doing right now to put myself in a good place for 2024? Personally, I don’t believe that it’s about what you do. It’s more about how you think. It’s about reflection and documentation. That is why, in today’s episode, I share a little bit about the past 12 months at Boss Project and highlight some of our major successes and challenges. I also offer you some critical questions to ask yourself to prepare you for 2024 and help you frame what you want for your future. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Over the last eight years, Boss Project has had so many offers and today I’m announcing the major simplifications to my offers that I am so excited about. I have been hesitating to do this episode for so long because I wasn’t sure if this was the direction that I wanted to go in and I have always been so ‘married’ to the direction I was committed to and steadfast about how I was going to get there. While that’s great, things change so often and it’s more beneficial to be able to act according to what’s happening in real-time and make pivots to your plan along the way.  I’m finally ready to share this because I’ve realized that it’s far more important to head in a direction without being so worried about how you’re going to get there. As long as your vision is at the forefront of your mind and you’re committed to taking small steps to get there, you’re on the right path! I have sold way more offers than the majority of the people in my industry have, probably because of how creative I am! I wondered what it would look like to give myself the freedom to be creative and the clarity of knowing what my offer is to make it easy for people to know what they are buying from me. So, I am going to simplify all of my offers into one!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

If you were to ask me how I feel about the rest of the year, I would probably tell you something about wanting to pack it up and see you guys in January! But I’m not going to do that. Instead, I want to talk about slowing down on purpose.  A few members of the co-op community have mentioned feeling as though they are always in a rush. What would it look like if you didn’t put so much of a timeline on so much of what you were doing? How much additional space, excitement, and desire would that give you creatively? How much fuel would that give to your life? Let’s talk about it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Today, on the seventh anniversary of the most traumatic event I have ever experienced, I want to open up about the five-car pile-up that changed the trajectory of my life and gave me pause to figure out how I can be successful despite all of the seemingly limiting and impossible things going on in my life. I am going to share my experience of what it’s like to build a business, provide for my family, and deal with chronic health conditions all at the same time. Less than a mile from my home, a trailer cut off upcoming traffic on a very busy street and the person behind me didn’t stop. In a split second, I was slammed into the vehicle in front of me. I was tachycardic and terrified.  I was in so much pain and as time passed, I was getting progressively worse and worse. I thought if people knew that I had a traumatic brain injury, my business would close. While I have come so far, there are still a ton of health risks for me in the future. The migraine that started on the day of my accident didn’t go away for years. Learning to live with chronic pain while attempting to run a business felt like the most impossible task. My face even changed and for the first time in my life, all I wanted to do was hide. Now I know that there was nothing to be embarrassed about and I am here to share my story so you can be successful through life’s curve balls.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Have you ever felt like your marketing efforts are stuck in a loop, missing out on untapped potential? Join me in this episode as we unlock the secrets of top-of-funnel marketing, a paradigm shift that could supercharge your small business's success. In today's digital age, we often find ourselves focusing on the mid-funnel, trying to convert those who are already aware of us into loyal customers. But what about those who've never heard of our business? How can we connect with them? This is where top-of-funnel marketing steps in, helping us create brand awareness, spark conversations, and engage with a whole new audience. Discover the strategies to stay ahead during economic challenges, as we delve into how innovation during tough times can lead to remarkable growth. I'll show you the power of "they get me" moments and the art of creating authentic connections with your audience. So, if you're ready to unlock untapped potential and drive your small business toward success, join me today as I unpack the game-changing world of top-of-funnel marketing! It's time to make a meaningful shift in your marketing strategy and connect with a broader audience, bringing fresh energy and opportunities to your business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

To drive more buyers to your offer, you have to get in front of more of your ideal clients. During this episode, we’re talking about getting visible! I’ve also got something super tactical to help you get there. I will even take back something I said before and share what it can open up for you. I have my eyes on Instagram and I have been in an effort for almost four months to re-figure it out! Today, I’m sharing more of what I have unlocked and started to understand about Instagram. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

One of the biggest things that contributes to your success is your visibility. Does your ideal audience know who you are, what you offer, and how you can uniquely solve their problem? If not, they are likely to choose someone with more visibility who provides a similar service. I recently had a coaching call with a client who is easily one of the most dynamic people I know. In this call, she told me that gaining visibility feels intimidating and asked me for some strategies to help her get past the discomfort of putting herself out there. Honestly, I was shocked that this was even an issue for her! If getting visible feels uncomfortable for someone who is already so engaging and confident, I realized that it must also be a concern for many of you listening. That’s why, in today’s episode, I’m taking a deep dive into getting visible, specifically how you can cultivate a mindset that will get you in front of more of your ideal clients and, ultimately, drive more buyers to your offer. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Today we are going to delve into one of the most talked about topics on the internet right now, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. A huge part of the reason I have avoided commentary until now is because I didn’t want to sound like a fan girl but you have all spoken and asked me to talk about this. You all know that I am a huge Taylor Swift fan so today I’m going to talk about something that is making a huge economic impact on not just my city, but cities around the world.  It feels like someone who is destined to be the queen of England (Taylor) is dating Prince Charming (Travis). Both of these people were already a big deal individually but now that they’re together, they have blown up even more! I want to talk about specific aspects of this relationship and the economic impact it’s created in Kansas City, how it’s affected sales, and what I anticipate it will do for our city moving forward.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

My relationship with money has completely evolved since I started this business, and in today’s episode, I want to talk about money! We all have our own beliefs about money and without a good relationship with it we are going to create a ceiling that is impossible to break through. I want to see you be wealthy, and I have literally made it my mission in life and business to help you become financially free! I absolutely believe that there are things that hold you back from your own success, and the beliefs you hold about money are a huge part of that when it comes to building a business that is going to support you financially.  Growing up, my family barely made it by and even struggled to put food on the table. I got my first job at 15 and set a standard for myself that was very basic and simple: to be able to afford a house and live comfortably. That was totally fine at the time, but I didn’t realize that it completely limited me. When I reached the point in my business where I had reached that final goal and things were looking up, I stagnated and did not know where to go. I desired more, but my underlying beliefs about money limited me. I had to learn how to dream bigger and make money neutral. I am so glad that I dedicated myself to this journey, and now I want to explore how your beliefs around money impact you and your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Your offer ecosystem will encompass all of your offers whether they exist now or in the future. I want you to imagine that your ideal client exists in this ecosystem. What tends to help business owners the most is to think of their ideal client as on a journey encountering problems that you’re there to help them solve. Your audience only knows what they know and you can help them on this journey in a way that’s really impactful. Your offers solve a variety of problems suitable to clients across the spectrum. Today we are going to focus on solving linear problems with clear solutions.  These linear paths offer an opportunity for you to have a wide variety of offers that all fit into a singular ecosystem. A primary offer that fits into this ecosystem is a bridge from one phase to the next on a particular client’s spectrum. In order to go from one stage to the next, the client needs the mechanics of how to get there and that is your deliverables. Any offer can deliver on the mechanics and sometimes it will completely remove the clients from having to do it themselves. Instead, you are going to take them there. Not just showing them how but rather moving them through it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

It’s been a little over 90 days since I took over as managing partner at Boss Project. Since then, I’ve been deep in experimentation! I’ve changed our email schedule, rolled out regular workshops and tried a ton of new tech and tools. I even planned out the next 16 months of promotions, product releases, and exciting new projects we are pursuing. On today’s episode, I’m giving you all a look behind the scenes: what’s working, what’s been fun, what I wouldn’t bother with, and what’s been the most effective.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

In today’s episode, we're going to uncover the secret strategies other marketers are using to sustainably scale. I’m going to give you the tools to leverage them inside of your own business and turn strangers into buyers. I'm here to pull back the curtain, revealing nine indispensable strategies to transform strangers into dedicated buyers and drive organic traffic, with little to no budget. Tuning in, you’ll hear me share exactly how to drive free organic traffic to create more predictable income in your business. These tools aren't just for a select few. They're universal for online entrepreneurs, be it creatives, consultants, content creators, or coaches. They've served me, bringing in millions, and they can serve you too. So let's get started! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

When Boss Project first started, it was very different from what it is today. And, whether I realized it or not, I was growing two business models simultaneously, while using entirely different marketing strategies for each one. Since then, I’ve seen an increasing number of entrepreneurs looking to diversify their revenue streams or even pivot their business models entirely. In today’s episode, I unpack how you can keep nurturing what you've built and let your business evolve by investigating the countless ways you can leverage organic marketing to grow your brand and fulfill the potential of your business. Tune in to learn how you can evolve your existing business while embracing the one you’re dreaming about! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

During today’s episode, I’m speaking with my partner in life and employee in business. Jared and I have been together for 15 years, married for 10, and working together since 2018. He’s been full-time at Boss Project for two years now, and under my management for about 90 days. Today, I’m answering all your questions about what it’s like to work and run a business with a spouse, and nothing is off the table!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com.

Joining us in this episode is Boss Project’s Program Manager and Creative Director, Caitlin O’Bryant. She is an integral part of the team and contributes to a broad mix of things, but she’s here today to discuss our development cycle, how we go from idea to launch to product, and offer improvement! After attending design school in Seattle, Caitlin took the leap and started her own business as a wedding stationery designer. Five years later, 2020 happened. By the time things had stabilized, she realized she had lost her spark for stationery. That’s when she applied for the role of Graphic Designer at Boss Project. The rest is history!  We’re in a brand new phase. So often we’re just sharing the end project, but today we want to give you some insight into how things start out as just an idea and what it looks like to make those edits. Let’s dive in. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the number one things I see business owners wrestling with is leads: how to get them, how to secure more of them, and how to pull them in with less effort. I want to assure you that it's fully possible to amass all the leads you could ever want and have your business entirely booked without doing all the legwork yourself! When I first fully booked my agency-style services, I went from being laid off to completely booked in a mere 30 days, matching my plush corporate salary in the process. Fast forward eight months, and I had hit my first $100,000! Just four months beyond that, I doubled it. I've unearthed nine methods to snag leads 100% on autopilot, and today, I'll share just the first two that overwhelmed me with more business than I could have ever imagined. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lately, I’ve shared a lot of the behind-the-scenes of my marketing and messaging pivot that has happened within my business but what I haven’t shared are the changes to my actual offer. This was not a small decision because I undid three and a half years of work to make my business more sellable and focused on what would give my clients better results. Today, I am going to share all of the changes I made in my business over the last three years. In order to give you the full behind-the-scenes, I need to back up quite a bit. I desperately wanted a product shop from 2016 and it was so far removed from the kind of business I was running. As time has passed, I have become more and more aware of the challenges associated with running one so I began to think about a digital shop. I saw a hole in the market for tools that help business owners enhance their client experience, present themselves more professionally, and speed up their sales process.  In January 2020, I launched the Creative Template Shop. I wanted to have everything available up front but I didn’t necessarily only want to sell these things once off. I wanted recurring revenue and that was only possible with some sort of membership option. This worked so well and was so focused on the product itself which allowed it to be removed from Boss Project. To make this viable we really had to lock in on the process and we managed to! We used the audience we already had to create warm traffic and present the Creative Template Shop to them. We also used paid advertising early on to focus on cold leads. We presented the products as individual things that could be purchased but as soon as the website was clicked on, it was very clear that becoming a member would be so much more worthwhile and as a result, very few people bought one-off templates. And then everything changed.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In order to become a successful entrepreneur, you need to make sure you’re on the cutting edge of your industry or else you run the risk of becoming obsolete. There is no such thing as having ‘arrived’ as a business owner, and thinking so will only stifle your growth. Exploring ideas makes me think specifically about pioneering innovation which is about discovering what’s never been achieved before and succeeding at making it happen. Pioneering innovation occurs when a brand-new product, service, or way of doing something is introduced into the market and I think that’s where people get stuck. Being successful does not require you to be a pioneer, inventor, or innovator!  I’m sure you have all heard of the adoption bell curve and the truth is that there are people at all different stages of that wave. This is usually discussed with reference buyers but it doesn’t just apply to consumers, it applies to business too! You can be a pioneering innovator at the forefront of your industry or you can ride the curve. You do not have to be first at something to be the best! Industry giants are built by observation and I would argue that your ability to observe is far more important than your ability to innovate. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should copy someone else's work, because copying is not what will make you successful. But learning from others and adapting can be such an incredible way to grow and make an existing idea even better!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the last 12 months, I've been doing an experiment. I wanted to prove that even after nearly a decade, the same principles still apply, still work, and still let you build a business that earns a reasonable salary and can support the life you want to live. When I first started my own business, I replaced my corporate salary in 30 days after being laid off. And in eight months, I made $100,000. Four months after that, I doubled it. A lot has changed in the intervening years — IRS technology is different, social media is constantly evolving — but do the same principles hold up? Last August, I quietly reopened the agency side of my business, calling it BP Studio. In 12 months, I pulled in $264,000 in revenue from high-end services. No paid ads, no social, no trendy marketing strategies. This growth? It's been 100% organic, all from warm leads that were already in my network. So if I did it once and then did it all over again eight years later, how did I pull it off? What changed and why? I can't wait to get into all of this with you in today's episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are many psychological reasons that you may want to be remembered when you’re gone, but before we start delving into these, I want to give a disclaimer that leaving a legacy is not a requirement to live a good life. It does not define the quality of your impact during your lifetime and is not part of your responsibility while you are alive. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a legacy is the amount of money or property left to someone in a will, but I believe that a legacy can be so much more than that! It’s an imprint. As if you left a piece of yourself behind.  A legacy can be the impact you have within the four walls of your own home and how you’ve affected family and friends or it can even stretch far beyond that. It’s not just a sum of money but rather the accomplishments that last a lifetime, your values, your ongoing influence, the good deeds you do, and so much more. If it’s not required to leave a legacy, then why is it so important to so many people? Well, because it gives you the opportunity to live for a purpose that’s bigger than yourself! According to Psychology Today, there are five reasons that people want to be remembered. So, let’s talk about them!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve dedicated today’s episode to telling you how I increased my downloads by a whopping 43% in just 30 days while multiplying my new subscribers by 12! These are crazy numbers at this scale. This is usually the kind of growth you would see over a year when you already have millions of subscribers. Today I’m sharing what I did differently and how I was able to drive so much more traffic and so many more sign-ups in real-time. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our last episode, Mariah Coz joined me to discuss our predictions for what the future of online business could look like. Today’s episode continues where we left off and gets into how these predictions will impact marketing in the online business world. Tuning in, you’ll learn why there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing, and how you should tailor your marketing strategy depending on your business model, whether that’s one-to-one, hybrid, or one-to-many. I unpack the answers to some commonly asked questions, including how niche you should go and how to identify who you’re talking to, before taking a look at how audiences have changed over the past few years. You’ll also find out how your audience impacts your efforts to be more visible and nurture leads, plus advice on what you can do to take your next steps! I want you to market your business in a way that works for YOU, not just now, but also in the future. So, join me as I break down everything you need to know about the future of marketing for online businesses! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There have been so many upheavals in the past few years, from COVID to the rise of AI, that making any predictions about the future can seem like an exercise in futility. But when you’ve spent enough years in an industry you become attuned to customer needs in new and surprising ways, allowing you to gain a deeper sense of where things may be heading next. Today on the podcast I’m thrilled to be talking with the wonderful Mariah Coz, Founder of Fearless CEO, where she helps creators monetize their business, through community content courses, and other creative digital products. Mariah is someone I’ve known in this online industry since the early days of my business. And over the last couple of years, I've had the great honor and pleasure of getting to know her as a personal friend. For today’s episode, Mariah and I get into a topic we are both extremely excited to discuss, namely, the future of online business and what this looks like. We get into how online business has changed since we first started in the industry, what to consider when choosing the path that makes the most sense to you, how we expect selling to evolve in the online space, and much more. Whether you’re a newbie unsure of where to start, or a seasoned professional taking stock of where to go next, this conversation covers all of it. And while we can’t predict the future with unerring accuracy, we can share what we expect based on everything we’ve learned over the past few years. So, for an expansive conversation on industry predictions and our advice on how to adapt from myself and the wonderful Mariah Coz, be sure to tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During today’s episode, I tell the story of how I went from a full-on crisis to the most clarity I have had in years! I want to invite you to join me in this movement. When I was able to take a deep breath for the first time, I knew that other people needed to experience this. I believe that everyone deserves the financial freedom that lets you go from social security to true financial freedom and lasting wealth that creates a secure future. I want you to have that gift! It’s not just about me. It’s not just about helping people to become stable. This is for every person running a business. I want you to be a part of it, so tune in today to learn how I went from crisis to clarity, discovered what’s next for my life and career, and how you can too! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen in on the phenomenal live webinar we offered this week. This information will change countless lives and give more women opportunities. I'm sharing clear strategies for scaling a business that most people don’t know about. We aren't messing with trendy marketing tactics that don’t work the same way for everyone. Every business is different and one person’s success does not define your own. That’s why I'm sharing the exact strategies and facts that will bring you success (and not just the shiny, sexy ones). You need this information. I will redefine what transparency looks like in this industry because it was not easy to get to where I am today. This is my genuine desire to see you succeed! If you'd like to see the slides that went along with this, you can watch the full video replay at bossproject.com/untitled-training. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I went from one sale to 439 leads in just 48 hours and I’m going to tell you exactly how I did it! I recently took the biggest gamble I have ever taken in my business. I refunded tickets to my upcoming Sales Flow workshop and scrapped everything my team and I had spent weeks preparing for. I did this because only one ticket was bought in 24 hours when I announced my workshop. This mission is far too important to me to let one dry season put me under. You only have one life and I want women everywhere to have choices, opportunities, and freedom! I can only make the kind of impact I want to make if more women in business know what I know.  So, I came up with a plan to save this workshop, this business, and a plan that will change countless lives and give more women opportunities. In nearly a decade of business, I have never seen numbers rise this fast! There are clear strategies for scaling a business that most people don’t know about. Instead, they have to rely on trendy marketing tactics that don’t work the same way for everyone. Every business is different and one person’s success does not define your own. That’s why I want to share the exact strategies and facts that will bring you success (and not just the shiny, sexy ones). You need this information. I will redefine what transparency looks like in this industry because it was not easy to get to where I am today. Sign up for my Untitled Workshop now at bossproject.com/untitled. This is my genuine desire to see you succeed and you have nothing to lose!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like to see this time of year as the opportunity to dive back in and come up with a fresh approach to plan for the future! This season can be about refining what you have built so that your business can continue to support you for a long time. I know that many of you use this time to make new goals and create new opportunities, but today I want to talk about what it looks like to prepare your business so that you’re ready when life comes at you again. Shit is going to hit the fan whether you want it to or not and I want you to build a business that can survive that without being so dependent on you. Personally, I never want to be financially dependent on anyone else and I know that many of you feel the same way! You want your business to work even when life gets thrown your way. You aren’t trying to fix the ‘shit,’ you’re trying to live and work while it’s happening! I do not think enough people understand the reality of the added stress being a business owner brings. The tiniest thing can happen that will completely derail your day or even your life. These things are part of life and will happen whether you have a business or not. So how do we deal with these challenges as they come up and prevent them from completely altering our future success? I know so many of you wish you could wave a magic wand and be at the point in your business where you could rely on it consistently in challenging seasons. And not being there yet is fine! What I want you to do is create a business that allows you to prioritize what you want and that is built to survive if you have to walk away for a while. If you want a business that can handle these things, you’re going to have to make some changes. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chances are, you started your business because you want to make a real impact. Like the badass you are, you wanted to do this independently and quickly took on clients and catered to their needs, often at your own expense. This, unfortunately, can only lead to burnout. There comes a point where you need to fix the situation or you’ll seriously consider quitting. I know, because I’ve been there, and I’m here to assure you that there are some very tangible ways to get out of this dreaded cycle that keeps people feeling trapped in the business they built that is supposed to be this opportunity for freedom. It’s time to address the underpricing epidemic plaguing the industry and in this episode, that’s precisely what we’re doing. So, buckle up and prepare to discover the power of proper pricing and building a strong financial foundation. Find out about the pricing calculator that takes all aspects of your business into account, helping you find the appropriate price points for your services. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I want to talk about where you’re going; whether you know what that looks like or not. I know that for many of you, you may not even be sure where you want to go and that’s okay! It’s really easy to overlook the value of your past experiences but you are, in essence, a cumulation of them and they can be so valuable in shaping where you want to go. I know a lot of you may not know the answer and that is okay! It’s not about knowing the answer, it’s about using this as a jumping-off point. Even all the previous jobs you’ve ever had shape the business you have today!  The real question now is how does your past inform where you’re going? These moments and experiences, big or small, can have a huge impact on what you want to do next. So how do we leverage it? It’s important to point out that this is not about speed but rather about pace! That’s why I came up with the PACE method and today, I’m sharing how these facts ultimately help you apply your findings to something that is actually actionable by breaking down PACE. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we’re delving into the world of passive income and how to truly build substantial wealth – the kind that leaves a legacy and transforms not only your life but also the lives of your family and future generations. Discover the reality behind passive income and how to create genuine financial security! In this episode, you’ll learn how the magic is in the mix with insights into the best active/passive combinations. I'll also be sharing details about an upcoming workshop that's all about building a real asset – your business – that will fuel your wealth journey. If you're ready to make your business a sustainable income source and gain control over your financial future, this workshop is a must-attend! So tune in for insight into finding the right mix for you, giving you the freedom to live life on your terms. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, I am going to be talking about what it looks like to budget when your income is inconsistent. Perhaps your business’ revenue and your pay is inconsistent and you want to create more sustainability across the board so that you can get paid more often and more predictably. I know the economy is insane at the moment and there is a lot happening right now so everything I am going to share with you today is what I would do when I want to have a more conservative approach in a time of uncertainty. I know that this will have an instrumental impact on how you change your business’ finances, create more personal financial stability, and solidify the future health of your business.  I need you to get the idea out of your head that businesses grow linearly or exponentially. They just don’t and you need to embrace these waves of inconsistency. I don’t want you to think that this sort of change means you’re doing something wrong because that isn’t true and running a business is simply too unpredictable. I want to help you find ways to manage these waves of inconsistency. I have been through periods of making huge amounts of money and periods of not even making enough to cover my family’s groceries for the month. In the first few years of running my business, I would take every dollar that would come into the business and use a percentage of it in a certain way, so I got paid when the business got paid. The problem with this is that it is very inconsistent and while it may work early on in the business as the most stable way to handle finances, it won’t work in the long run.  In your developmental years, you need a place to start because those dollars don’t always fall linearly even when you’re doing fantastically! While there are definitely things that you can be doing to create consistency in revenue, that’s not actually what I am going to be talking about today. I am going to be talking about creating consistency in your income and your pay; the money that goes into your personal bank account. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about taking every bump out of your business because bumps will happen! This is about creating predictability in your personal financial future and helping you save appropriately so that you can manage the unpredictability that will inevitably come. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m sharing an incredibly personal story about a crisis I faced in 2022 and the profoundly transformative impact it’s had on my life. Clocking that I was the same age as my mother when he had her brain surgery 30 years ago triggered a deep existential crisis in me and in this episode, I open up about my personal journey of self-reflection. With the insights and exercises I learned along the way, I’m eager to provide you with the tools to move through your own transformation. Out of necessity, I’ve become well-acquainted with what it looks like to truly reflect deeply, and I want to share my process so that you, too, can understand what's important to you and learn how to prioritize it going forward. Feel free to treat this episode as your compass to navigate the uncertain waters of self-discovery! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking all things Barbie; specifically, the marketing budget which is the biggest marketing budget we have seen for a movie in a long time! This company has taken a brand we all know and love and made it more relevant decades later. So what will this massive budget mean for entertainment moving forward and what can we learn from it as small businesses?  The Barbie movie team spent $150 million on marketing on top of the $145 million they spent on the actual production, and the ROI is there, as the production already made the entire amount back in the first weekend alone! There are hundreds of collaborations, and this is absolutely incredible! There have recently been loads of discussions about the profitability of femininity, and any nay-sayers have been proven wrong time and time again. Amazing things happen when women are supported; this movie is more proof! There has been a very interesting shift in toys recently, and Barbie has seen some controversy for not being diverse and inclusive enough, representing enough of a variety of jobs, and being body positive. This movie helps us remember what Barbie felt like when we were children, before all of this stuff mattered to us! This age-old brand has the heart of many women, and the movie, which was produced for millennial women and not children, reawakens this nostalgia. The movie is even fairly satirical and makes fun of the Barbie world in many ways. There is a lot of power in looking at totally different industries from your own to find things you can learn from! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it just us, or have you also noticed the major shake-ups that have been taking place in the social media space recently? From Threads to TikTok Shop to the Twitter rebrand, we’re taking a deep dive into some of the wild stuff that’s been going on in this episode! We’ve been following things very closely and, from our perspective, more has happened in the month of July 2023 than in the last three years! So, we decided that now is the time to catch you up on all the developments on social and the impact that these changes are likely to have on your small business. We know change can be challenging, but trust us. If you embrace it, it can do wonders for your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quitting corporate and striking out on your own can be a daunting task. But with the right preparation and strategies, you can build the business you’ve always wanted without feeling totally overwhelmed. Today on the show, I share the story of how I quit corporate and started my own business in 2015 and how I would go about doing it again in 2023. Back in 2015, the online landscape was totally different, and starting your own company had far more barriers to entry than it does today. In the intervening years, technological advances have made it easier than ever to earn money online and organize your systems. While it’s wonderful that these tools have made starting a business more accessible, it also means that it can be more difficult to get your name out there. Tune in for a breakdown of my journey, the lessons I’ve learned along the way, and a rundown of my advice for anyone looking to quit corporate and set out on their own in 2023! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do grief and grit mean for women who are balancing life and business? Sometimes, experiencing enormous hurt and pain turns you into the most authentic version of yourself. The topic of grief is incredibly personal and important to me because it is one of the primary reasons for my growth and success. Grief is equally as frustrating and painful as it is beautiful, hopeful, and inspirational. In simple terms, grief is the ultimate shapeshifter! There is no right or wrong way to grieve as it impacts everyone differently. Today, I want to share some of my own experiences with grief before diving into how you can turn your grief into grit in both your personal life and your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boss Project is going through its biggest transition yet! For the last 24 months, Abagail has been almost exclusively in the finance and sales side of the company. She’s been creating spreadsheets, thinking about company benefits, sales processes, hiring, HR, and more. That has meant she’s been out of the marketing game. She simply hasn’t been thinking about social media and sales funnels for two years and she’s excited to dive back in! You can expect experimentation as she gets her feet wet; trying and testing different things. It’s going to be focused, it’s going to be intentional, and it’s definitely going to be fun! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Abagail interviews our very own Emylee to talk about her shift into full-time authorship, what she has learned thus far from her rapid transition into this new field, and the leap of faith it took to pursue her passion! If you missed out on parts one and two of this series, we encourage you to go back and give those a listen so that you’re all caught up for this latest conversation. While we are sad to see Emylee leave her role as Co-CEO of Boss Project, we are so excited to see her embarking on this next chapter as she pursues her passions. Tune in as we talk about Emylee’s journey as an author, how she’s been navigating the writing process, and what it’s been like going from a partnership to working solo! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we look back at the last eight years and celebrate all that Boss Project has accomplished! We’re sharing our journey as business partners, what it’s been like to work together, and some pearls of wisdom we’ve picked up along the way. Let’s dive into how we got here!  If you missed Part One of our four-part series, then you must go back and listen immediately! There are details and nuances that are going to be noticeably absent if you don’t go back and listen to that first episode first. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here at Boss Project, we’ve had some pretty big changes happening offstage in a surprisingly short amount of time! Today, we’ll be chatting about these changes, how we’re navigating them, and what you can expect from Boss Project going forward. Tuning in, you’ll hear some pretty big news along with our thoughts on what we’ve learned from adjusting to these new developments and an overview of our upcoming four-part series. While periods of transition can be intimidating, they can also be incredibly exciting. This may all be happening a lot faster than we expected, but we have full confidence in our plans going forward and we invite you all to be a part of it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we’re talking about what it means to have a culture of curiosity and how you can deliberately cultivate it within your organization. This can be one of your biggest assets and can help your team members take ownership of projects, tasks, ideas, and even strategies! It takes intentional building blocks to get there and we want to help you put those blocks together. In our previous episode, Experimental Mindset Part 1, we talked about what it means to develop an experimental mindset, questions you need to ask yourself, things you need to let go of, and some of the different headspaces that we have been in throughout our business journey. Following on from that episode, this one delves into the strategic side of how you can actually go about fostering a culture of curiosity!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does an experimental mindset mean? How can you foster one in yourself and your team? That’s what we’re talking about today. Both Emylee and Abagail experience a constant push and pull that comes with mixing intuition with analysis. We see so many business owners that stay in the planning and research phase for so long that they never take action in one direction or the other. That’s so frustrating to see! That’s what sparked this training. Everything in your business is evolving. That includes your goals, what it takes to get there, and the headspace you need to be in to get there. We can say all day that business isn’t linear, but you’re not going to understand that until you’ve lived it! When businesses meet a challenge, they usually fail and give up entirely or succeed and seek a new challenge because they believe the journey should be harder. That’s really hard to watch. We want to arm you with some thoughts and ideas that equip you to live in that experimental space that sees failure as information. We want to equip you to take the steps that allow you to incrementally move towards your goals. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We didn't realize how much we would come to rely on our business values. They are central to how we operate our team, answer questions, and so much more. Initially, your company operations are typically a reflection of you personally, but as you grow, that doesn’t always make sense. As you work with more and more clients, we recommend identifying one to three values to shape how you serve clients, what your boundaries will be, how you prefer to communicate, your work style or ethic, and beyond. Especially as you engage with employees and contractors, having an internal value that is very specific to how your team runs is critical to your team culture and getting everyone on the same page. It helps settle conversations about what to do next by providing a lens through which to view things. When you need to have a redirecting conversation with a client, your business values are the strongest tool you have at your disposal to explain what you do and do not offer.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By now, you should all know that we are the queens of tweaking and repeating. In this episode, we spill the beans on how to revolutionize your client experience by (you guessed it) tweaking and repeating! After a quick debrief of our thoughts on outsourcing and AI, we uncover the often-overlooked aspects of client delivery and discuss the significance of investing time in developing consistent processes. From creating efficient systems and templates to ensuring clarity and alignment in contracts and proposals, we explore the strategies you can implement to create a streamlined client experience and bring in the referrals and testimonials you deserve. Join us as we reveal the benefits of continuous improvement and offer practical insights to help you enhance your client interactions and boost your business to new heights! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking about the art of the follow-up. You’ve pitched your service and the potential client is either ghosting you, being passive-aggressive, or fighting against the process you want to put them through. This can be a very strange experience and sometimes prospects convert with quite a lot of resistance. Closing a prospective client happens in the follow-up process, and a lot of us struggle with that phase. Today’s episode gives you some examples of what you can say and do to confidently and effectively follow up with your leads. We’re tackling what a proper follow-up is and how to handle hearing ‘no’. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are unearthing an episode that we recorded at the end of 2022 because it’s important that you hear this. The strategy this client used is still extremely relevant and effective in the current sales climate where leads are a little bit wonky. This is the perfect time to seek improvement opportunities within your sales cycle and work on increasing your close rate.  We walk you through how our client was able to increase her close rate by a whopping 40%, and how you can be just as successful in your own sales process. In this season, focus and refine how things are looking in your business. Evaluate what’s working, what’s not, and use that critical information to make strategic, educated plans as you move forward with your business. Start gathering this data and figure out where you want to place your focus and where your biggest opportunities are right now. Today we’re using particular examples from a previously aired episode to help you learn how to improve your close rate.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's episode, we address a major issue in the business education industry that is causing our clients to waste time and money. While marketing is important, we believe that many marketing pros are teaching people to become marketing minions instead of teaching foundational business concepts. Unfortunately, this often results in a misconception of what marketing entails.  Let’s update our perspective on marketing from a "necessary evil" to a vital component of your business' success that can be tailored to suit your own strengths and needs. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re talking about food stuff today! Emotional eating, disordered eating, cycle syncing, and all things diet, mindset, and health. Consider this a non-judgmental space packed with practical techniques you can employ in your own life today. That said, if this isn’t your jam right now, you have our full permission to skip this episode, listen to an old one, or go hang out on Instagram and wait for our next one. So many women struggle with binge eating, emotional eating, cycle issues, hormone imbalances, and weight loss or body image blocks. Amber Romaniuk has been through it all! Through healing herself and working alongside her clients for over ten years, she has helped many women overcome these issues and find freedom. In this episode, she offers the insight that there is a close relationship between people-pleasing and weight gain and offers self-priority as an alternative. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are more ways than ever to get in touch with customers and sell your services. But how do you know which methods are right for you and your business? And how do you ensure that you’re implementing them to the best of your abilities? One method that has gained a tremendous amount of traction over the past decade, is social selling. Not only do the stakes of a DM feel lower than getting on a high-pressure sales call, but it’s also more accessible to people with unusual schedules or chronic illnesses. But what are some of the drawbacks of social selling, and are they worth the payoff? In today’s episode, we talk about why we stopped using social selling and how you can determine whether it’s the right choice for you and your business. We unpack how using social selling affected our boundaries outside of work, our values as a life-first business, and why the downsides of social selling ended up outweighing the benefits. While we believe that social selling can be a great sales tool, we want businesses to consider their options and make informed decisions based on the facts, and what will work best for them. Tune in to hear what our experience with social selling was like, why we stopped, and how to find out whether it’s right for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we’re talking about one of our favorite things: how to work less and enjoy your life more! A lot of us like the idea of slowing down in the summer and taking some more life-first days, but sometimes it gets really hard to do that! We recently read an article called Ten Red Flags That Show You’re Addicted to Work According to a Psychotherapist. It’s a neat perspective from a mental health professional, and today’s episode is dedicated to sharing their insights with you. We hope that afterwards, you’ll be able to look at your schedule and see exactly where you could be a little bit more self-aware about the areas where your relationship with work is teetering on toxic. You don’t have to tick all these boxes to be a workaholic. If even one of them feels true for you, it’s time to reflect! Consider them as useful guides to help you identify workaholism. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not every client relationship runs as smoothly as we’d like and, generally speaking, it comes down to communication gaps and unspoken expectations. In this episode, we break down a scenario that one of our clients experienced and share our advice for dealing with the situation. In this particular scenario, our client found that her client was treating her like an employee, despite the fact that she's technically a contractor. Because this problem is more common than you might think, we’ve decided to share our perspective and insights into how one might navigate a situation like this. It’s easy to get frustrated, but there are ways to address communication gaps with clients and continue to nurture long-term relationships. Join us as we shed light on how to enhance the client experience while maintaining healthy boundaries for your business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we want to chat with you about how to future-proof your industry, expertise, and career in the AI age. Recently, we’ve been having the conversation about AI a lot and sharing some perspectives as well as talking about some software companies we’ve enjoyed using; including a conversation with the CEO of ChatGPT. This is a conversation that needs to be addressed often so we can understand how it can best support us.  The Harvard Business Review has come up with five ways to future-proof your career in the age of AI and we have also come up with five ways so today, we are sharing 10 actionable steps you can take to do this. Tune in today for a jam-packed episode and make sure to grab a pen and paper to write these tips down! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s episode is an overview of a recent conversation we sat in on, which discussed navigating change in 2023. The panel included a list of industry leaders, the CFOs of AirBnb Midjourney, Masterclass, Step, and Aon PLC. Although these businesses are all incredibly well-funded and resourced, we have found that what happens in larger businesses tends to have a trickle-down effect, and smaller businesses will mirror their patterns. That’s why we’ve dedicated this episode to sharing some key insights from the discussion with our audience at Boss Project. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can we expect from the future of AI? How quickly will we be asked to evolve and adapt alongside these changes? Abagail recently had the opportunity to sit in on a fireside chat with Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI and ChatGPT. This episode is dedicated to sharing the highlights of what she heard. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here at Boss Project, our mission starts with wanting to see more women become financially free. We want them to be able to take care of their household financially and, ultimately, build and scale a business from the ground up. Our goal is to help create a stable foundation that will give them confidence as leaders and support them in pursuing continued growth. Unfortunately, the differences in how men and women are treated in the workplace can harm women's ability to grow and flourish as leaders. A recent study of 146 mid-career leaders explores the gender differences in how men and women are given feedback in the workplace. Their findings identified four key problem areas: vision, political skills, asserting leadership, and confidence. In this episode, we break down these four categories and take a closer look at how men and women are treated differently when it comes to guidance and feedback and what can be done to begin to adjust for these discrepancies. Tune in as we discuss the four key ways in which men are getting more actionable feedback than women and what to do about it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated, for show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We see so many business owners who think that the answer to scaling is more about cash than relationships. Yes, cash is a component but it is not the primary problem! First of all, we want to talk about growth versus scaling. They are used interchangeably in this industry but they simply are not the same. Growth is primarily centered around financial and revenue changes in your business and scaling is more about the actual behind-the-scenes operations of how your business is pieced together.  Often, when people try to scale their business they are so focused on growing their revenue that they forget about all the foundational pieces that are required in order for the revenue to grow. When you put the time and energy into these architectural pieces, you will be surprised at how quickly the revenue growth follows. You can kind of think of these things as the SOP for how you’re doing business; how the business as a whole is being operated and you need to define what that looks like. We find that people get to a certain point where they hit a type of sales cycle and our goal is to help you scale past this point by productizing literally everything! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every decision we make takes us down a different path, each with its own set of consequences. Decisions aren’t categorically good or bad, right or wrong, but today, we discuss how you can learn to make the best business decisions for YOU! This conversation was sparked by an interesting article that we came across in Forbes that highlighted some of the key points that we have been expressing on the show about goals, outcomes, and living in alignment with our values.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re sharing a bit of our progress when it comes to delegating. We started out being bad at getting things off our plates, but now we are getting better and better and we want you to learn from our mistakes. Delegation is truly the stepping stone to get the right people on your team! Ultimately, you’re going to need to hire extra team members to take on some tasks in your business. Most of what we’re talking about today is how to delegate to an employee properly and while there are overlaps when it comes to delegating to a contractor, there are definitely nuanced differences. Today we are specifically looking at delegating to existing team members who have been through the full onboarding process and understand you and your business very well. To us, proper delegation comes down to communication! Listen carefully because we want you to document all of these things we are discussing today and explain them to the person you want to delegate to.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the past 30 days, more than 2,000 new AI tools have been released. There is no doubt about it; AI is going to have a major impact on how we work, how we ask questions, and how we search for information. No industry will go untouched by this technology and significant changes have already begun to take place. This causes fear in some people, excitement in others, and often a combination of both! A few months ago, we had a conversation on the podcast about AI, but because of how much everything has progressed, we decided to have another one. While we don’t know what the future will look like, we know it will look very different from the present! Join us today as we discuss eight new AI websites that can help you optimize your business processes and add value to your life. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An overwhelming majority of female-owned businesses (88%, to be exact) are run by women who do not have a single employee. That means they are essentially doing everything on their own. And if you are pursuing growth, then running your company without any support is not a sustainable business model! We are seeing many seasoned entrepreneurs reach a breaking point where they can’t decide whether they should give up their business or commit to becoming a leader and bringing on a team to support them. If this sounds like you, and you want to create a change, then it may well be time to re-envision your role within your business. Our goal is to see more and more women occupy a true CEO seat. Our C-Suite on Demand program is designed to help more women take the step from being a solo CEO to becoming a leader that has the team she needs to support her vision. Tune in as we take a closer look at the options available to CEOs who want to re-envision their role and enter the next phase of leadership, all with the support of our team at Boss Project!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a business owner, you will unlock different tiers of problems that you need to solve. While working with folks inside the Incubator, we’ve encountered many questions that we would categorize as ‘next level.’ We realized we have a lot we can help those people with. That’s what’s led us to introduce a brand new offer. We are so excited to talk about our new opportunity for people! These are people who entered the Incubator, thinking that the next step for them was to start hiring more people. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t that! Instead, we worked with them on refining their offer so that they could start getting paid appropriately. Once they start getting those achievable results, they’re in the position to start looking for more people to hire. How much do you save for hires? How much should you plan to pay them? What can you expect the return to be once you’ve brought someone on? How do you ensure you’re creating an incredible, ethical culture? We realized there’s a lot we can help you with.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have been tuning in to our podcast alongside the Incubator and looking for something better suited to where you are in your journey. We love that for you! Today’s episode is dedicated to you. We’re here to discuss some of the challenges you may face and how you can approach them. Many of our Incubator graduates reach a point where they slowly want to remove themselves from some of the deliverables of their service. They want to be involved with strategy and direction, but they’re ready for everything else to fall to their team. They’re ready for the next phase, and this can be intimidating! This is not less work for them. In fact, at first, it’s more work. After that, it’s different work. This isn’t about removing your job from the business. It’s shifting your focus to different aspects of the business. It will require you to grow and evolve as a manager, leader, and CEO. You’re going to go from just being the person who founded the business to sitting in a true CEO or leader’s seat. It’s such an exciting thing for us to see! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does your input feel aligned with your output? If you are billing hourly, chances are things are beginning to feel unbalanced. In this episode, we fill you in on how we can help you make the transition from hourly billing to value-based pricing, creating a more predictable business and recurring income. Today, we want to introduce you to new pricing models and provide insight into how to prepare your clients for the changes.  If you don’t want to be trading each of your hours for a dollar, it’s time to consider value-based pricing. If you continue to only get paid for the time you’re physically working on clients’ projects, you’re never going to be able to scale beyond a personal income. You need to be paid for every aspect of your job! There is a way to transition without dismantling your current business and our Incubator program will walk you through the steps. Stay tuned as we break down how, exactly, our Incubator program is structured and how we can help you calculate the ideal pricing for your unique business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have been seeing a lot of frustrating things in the business world lately, so today, we are going to be talking about marketing ploys and business strategies that we don’t align ourselves with. We strongly believe that if you work with a coach, you should ensure that that person lives their life and runs their business in a way that aligns with your belief system, so that you can create a life and a business that you really, truly want.  Tune in today to hear about the things that give us “the ick” in the industry and how we are doing things differently. We want you to know that there is an easier way to go about things than what you may have been experiencing up until now. The process is going to be different for everyone, and we want to help you find the most optimal approach for YOU! We hope that you walk away knowing exactly what kind of space this is and what you can expect from us going forward. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our new Incubator is finally here! It’s always exciting taking on a new cohort, and in this episode, we break down what you can expect from our newly refined Incubator program and how to determine whether it’s right for you. Tuning in you’ll learn about the type of issues we address (like how to price correctly) and how we help business owners step into their role as CEO by gaining a deeper understanding of the different aspects of their business and how they impact one another. We want to help you find ease and joy in your business again, whatever stage you’re at. And even if you’re not a good fit for our Incubator program, we’d love for you to get in touch so that we can help you get to the next level. Join us as we unpack what it means to take your business to the next level and how to build ease into your life through our new Incubator program! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have a list of goodies to share with you of things we have learned over the last 18 months. We aren’t digging into the archives from years ago. These are definitely things we have learned and implemented more recently and they are things we know you can benefit from. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, these are tips that you should pay attention to for yourself and figure out how they can work for you!  We know that the last couple of years have been very strange and we started noticing things that we used to do consistently and used to get predictable results from not working at all anymore and we even got negative results. This is not uncommon for service-based business owners to experience at all! We wanted to gather up the best things that moved the needle the most for our business especially when things are confusing. You may be surprised at how foundational these steps actually are and we came up with these ideas as a sort of experiment.  In the last 18 months, our business has more than doubled, we went from a team of two to a team of seven full-time, we reduced our contractor load while still having subject matter experts, and our revenue is on a completely different playing field than it ever has been before. We have focused more on our values and taken these steps to move the needle substantially for our business. We want you to develop an experimental mindset and actually live in it and here is how!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How are you spending your time as a business owner, and what are you choosing to prioritize? As the CEO of your company, it’s crucial that you allocate your time in the best way possible. This, however, is much easier said than done. While the internet is populated with countless examples of how to increase your productivity and get more done during your working hours, few of them take into account the myriad of distractions and obligations that you and your clients need to contend with on a daily basis. In this episode, we break down a time hack that actually works for small businesses (and it doesn’t involve waking up at 5 AM every day!). Our goal is to walk you through what you need to be prioritizing as a CEO and what percentage of your time you should be spending on each category. The lessons we share today will provide you with a fantastic foundation that you can continue to build on. Tune in to learn how you should be spending your time as CEO and how to become confident in the knowledge that your attention is exactly where it should be! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are so excited to walk you through some of what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Today we are going to let you guys filter through our brains about how we got to this point, what is new, and how you can be a part of it. One of the incredible things about running an online business is that we have been able to be part of a lot of the shifts that have happened for the entire industry. We have had to act and react based on many changes and our business has gone through loads of pivots.  But not to worry, Boss Project isn’t going in a totally new direction. Our mission has always been very much the same and we are still focused on helping more women create profitable and sustainable online businesses so they can become financially free! Using that as our focus, we have always been on a journey to improve constantly, and now, we are finally at the point we have always wanted to be at. When we launched our Incubator, we wanted to be able to measure as many things as possible. Our incredible program manager was very intentional about implementing surveys, measuring the people joining the program and their growth, critiques, attendance, milestone calls, and our clients’ revenue. We dove deep into this data so that we could see things across the board. It’s all about creating an environment where more people can be successful, generate more revenue, and improve their lifestyles. We are so excited about this new version of the Incubator that is going to support the whole you in the most incredible way! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we share what we’ve learned about the business journey, and break down some of the phases, checkpoints, and milestones you’ll experience along the way. Throughout our careers, we’ve had the honor and privilege of working with some pretty phenomenal service-based organizations. And due to the nature of our work, we’ve had the opportunity to observe the inner workings of countless small businesses. In that time, we’ve seen key patterns emerge that we believe anyone can learn from! We want to help you identify where you are in your journey and figure out why you might be feeling stuck. Once you can locate yourself in the overall journey, you'll learn to visualize the next steps and how to prepare for them. That can mean putting key foundations in place so that you are able to move forward, or coming to the realization that you are actually really happy in the phase you are currently in. The key lesson that we want to leave you with today is that this journey never really ends. There is no end game when it comes to business! When you acknowledge this, you can begin to enjoy the journey so much more and appreciate where you’re at; whatever that phase may be! Join us today for an expansive conversation where we break down the ten phases we’ve observed across business journeys and unpack our belief that there is no “done” in business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we discuss the difference between one-time projects and retainer projects for clients and how you can determine which is right for you. There are many filters through which to run your decision-making process when deciding whether to explore one over the other or have a hybrid between the two. In this episode, we share insight into the questions you should be asking yourself in order to make that call. We break down the financial benefits and challenges of one-time projects and retainers, respectively, and explain how to gauge which model is right for you! You’ll find out when it makes sense to consider the hybrid model, and why it’s essential to hold the future in mind when settling on your service structure. Tune in to find out which model makes the most sense for your business, both financially and systematically. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re talking about pricing! We have been discussing pricing for creative small business owners since the beginning. This is our happy place! We have a new version of this conversation today and are excited to share it with you. Let’s face it, the market is just totally weird right now. Business owners approach us often, asking for advice about whether to pivot or start over. And 90% of the time, we’re Team Pivot, as long as you ensure that your pivot aligns with what the market sees as essential. You’ve got to meet your clients or prospective clients where they’re at. So what does it take to close different kinds of clients at different price points? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As you probably know by now, we’re obsessed with talking about pricing, so this episode is one of our new favorites! This conversation is more important than ever right now because of the current economic climate. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits all pricing model so today, we’re going to walk you through a couple of different scenarios that we have seen are working well for people. We’ve sold everything from $29 products to $450,000 services and everything in between. So, rest assured, we know what we’re talking about when it comes to pricing. One of the consequences of the economic environment is that people start leaning away from education and towards done-for-you offers. Focusing on perfecting your pricing is your opportunity to continue to make everything make sense again!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are diving into what you need to get right in your service-based business. This has a dramatic effect across the board and will either make your business very successful or lead to its failure! The people getting this wrong are often the ones who are on the road to burnout, are overworked and underpaid, they feel like everything is working against them and all systems are broken, they’re not reaching their financial goals and don’t understand why, and they don’t know where all their time is going.  This may seem like a complicated issue but before you fear that all hope is lost, we are going to touch on a bunch of little things that are interconnected and all impact each other to help you. Believe it or not, all of what this comes down to is two things that have a major impact on everything else. We are addressing these things in this episode and finally having the much needed conversation to take these things deeper than surface level and ensure your businesses success!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our mission at Boss Project is to empower creative business owners to build a life and business that excels financially and supports them soulfully. Since we started this business, we have been truly dedicated to helping build a community of fiercely supportive people that are also ridiculously profitable. So much of that comes with financial literacy. We want to see more women and femmes in business be not only financially safe but financially thriving. That’s a huge reason we brought on today’s guest who is dedicated to empowering people through financial literacy. Shannon McLay is the CEO and Founder of Financial Gym, a revolutionary financial services company, and she is an expert in helping others to build both personal and business finance. Shannon offers a membership package, consults with clients and connects them to trainers on her team. There’s a missing piece of financial literacy, especially for women and femmes in the creative small business space. Figuring out where to start to build better financial health can feel like a minefield, but through Financial Gym, Shannon makes it possible to reach those business goals.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maybe you’re a one-woman show. Maybe you’ve hired a part-time employee or a contractor or two. You have probably seen significantly high profits in your first few years. Now, you’re entering years three, four, five, and beyond, and you want to pay yourself more, hire more, or have other expenses you want to reallocate funds to. You’re so married to your high profits, that you will create goals for yourself to do anything you can to maintain those profits while being able to spend more money. We really want you to give yourself a bit of a break here! And that’s exactly what we hope to empower you to do through this episode.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're talking about creating an intranet (which we also refer to as a “garage”) for your company. This is separate from the project management of your day-to-day operations. This is more about setting the precedent for your company culture, creating SOPs, and focusing on other high level elements that are essential to the running of a successful business. You can think of it as Union Station for your team, your clients, and you!  Until we had an intranet in our business, we wouldn’t have known it was missing. Now, we can’t imagine ever living without it! It has been so useful in so many ways. At first we used it only internally, but then we decided to branch out and use it to enhance our clients’ experience, and the results have been incredible.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people who go into business are usually technicians who are really skilled at one area of the business. Learning to be a leader in your business is the most challenging part of running a business. Here’s the hierarchy we see: you’re a technician, and then hopefully you begin to love sales too. Then, hopefully, you begin to learn and love how to be a leader. If you don’t like sales, then we would say, don’t start a business. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find a way to sell that is in alignment with you, but you do absolutely have to find a way to like it. During our last episode, we talked about all the reasons getting into a partnership is a terrible idea. If you ever want someone to talk you out of getting into a partnership, we’re here for you. That said, we’re dedicating today’s episode to sharing with you why it absolutely works for us. All of these points can make you into a better boss, a better partner, and a better friend. They’ll come in handy for a variety of settings. Honestly, seeking someone to fulfill some of these for you instead of seeking a partner will serve you really well. At the end of the day, you’re just trying to scratch the itch we’re talking about, and we’re here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be scratched by a partner! You might need a handful of people, instead of just one, but it’s worth it!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been asked countless times about our business partnership and our take on whether we feel that partnership is a good route. We’ve been in a partnership from the get-go, and clients are often curious as to how we manage communication and generally maintain a healthy working relationship. In this episode, we tackle the cons of partnership: why you should never get into one and why, and the next episode will explore the pros. Naturally, there are potential issues that can arise and cause tension in a partnership, and today we identify what to look out for if you’re considering partnering up with someone. You’ll discover a few of the, dare we say, many drawbacks of partnership, the requirements for maintaining a successful partnership, and the principal cause of partnerships (and subsequently, businesses) going down in flames! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to live more and do less is one of our favorite topics of conversation. If you’re a natural people pleaser, it can be really hard to consider taking some things off of your to-do list. But people-pleasing can be rooted in a manipulative reflex. It can also be a trauma response. During the conference that Abagail recently attended, she heard from three speakers with one underlying message - do less! While this sounds counterintuitive, it's something we truly believe, and we want to share some of the nuggets of wisdom that helped us to prioritize this in our own lives, within a productivity-obsessed culture. Three inspiring speakers shared very different insights from their own personal journeys and the research they have done to understand the lives of others. Today, we’re sharing them with you. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you follow us on social media, you might have seen that we have been on quite the podcast roadshow! One theme that kept coming out of our conversations is the things that service providers need to think about before scaling. We realized we need to take a step back and talk about it: what is scaling actually? A lot of business owners misconstrue scaling and growth. Today, we want to talk about the actual definitions of these two processes, and how you can apply them in your business. You can have one without the other. You can have both. You can have neither. What does that really look like, intentionally, in your business? Tune in to find out! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been building websites for over a decade and have really honed in on what’s working (and what isn’t) in the service world. Your website might look impressive, but if it’s not representative of who you are today, it’s not serving you. In this episode, we outline five signs it’s time to consider a new website design. And we’re not merely talking about branding! In many cases, major reconfigurations are in order, taking into account everything from your site architecture and user interface to your messaging; what you’re saying, how you’re saying it, and who you’re connecting it to. Tune in to find out which pitfalls to avoid and how best to make your website work for you. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking about hiring in the current economic climate. The biggest layoffs since 2008 are taking place at the moment, and layoffs in the technology industry have actually surpassed those that took place during the Great Recession. The common trend that we are seeing amongst business owners who have been operating for more than four years is a collective desire to move away from being the “doers” in their business and shift towards a leadership position where they can focus more on strategy and creative direction. This means needing to hire people who can take up the “implementer” type of work. A lot of the work we are doing with our clients is around how to make this pivot as smooth and successful as possible! It’s a challenge, but it’s such an important move to make if you are going to take your business to the next level.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s discussion is about an idea that has had a resurgence recently for a number of reasons. The concept of finding a Third Place is nothing new! It’s actually been around for a long time; it is just popular at the moment. No matter how trendy it is, it is worthwhile to discuss and integrate into your life. The ‘Third Place’ was coined by a US sociologist who wrote a book called The Great Good Place describing a place outside of your home or work where you can relax. The concept is simple. Your first place is your home; a private and domestic space. Your second space is your work. However, a lot of us share a first and second place, with workplaces increasingly choosing to be remote/hybrid over the last few years. We spend most of our lives at work or home so what do you do when you need a Third Place? Somewhere to feel comfortable and safe, and have fun with no judgment? With loneliness and isolation levels rising, we have to be mindful of this!  In our opinion, a strong requirement is that your Third Place needs to be a public setting that hosts informal gatherings of people. Most people are loyal to their Third Place and often go there to socialize and unwind. It is also preferable that your Third Place is close to your home and workplace. This spot may be a coffee house, pub, bar, beauty salon, local library, dog park, or so much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of our clients are currently in a space where they are wanting to add to their team but have concerns over how to make the right choices while maintaining the character and values of their company. We’ve recently expanded our team, and while it has come with some lessons, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience for our company and our team! In today’s episode, we unpack the five biggest barriers to trust, as outlined in an article by Fast Company called 5 Barriers To Break in Order To Build Trust Between Coworkers. We discuss the rules that all high-trust companies follow to ensure employees feel secure and confident in their work environment.  Growing your team can be intimidating, but with the right tools, you can do so in a way that is manageable and engenders a sense of trust amongst your team members. Tune in as we discuss how to foster an environment that is psychologically safe for employees, what you can do to ensure effective communication, how to make sure you hire and promote the right people, and much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We talk so often about financial literacy and creating sustainable businesses online that we’ve had a handful of clients ask us questions about bookkeeping. Based on all of the questions that come in, there are some things we want to share with our listeners about how to make sure that you have a bookkeeper that’s really well suited to you. Whether you’re interviewing someone for the first time or looking to get the most out of your existing relationship, this episode is for you. So many of us really lean into trusting the experts in this industry, which is great! But over the last few years, there has been a new level of service that’s been expected and desired from clients. Now we want our financial professionals to go a little bit above and beyond just reconciling the books, to really help us understand and learn from our numbers. That is the biggest gap that we see happening for most business owners. That’s why we want to equip you with the best questions to ask to make sure that you find the right person to work alongside you; not just someone to “do it for you.” Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our mission in business is to help more women build profitable, sustainable businesses online. So much of that success is rooted in proper financial literacy. It’s so important to understand how to manage your finances so that you can take out enough money to live the life you want while at the same time ensuring that you leave enough money in the business so that it remains profitable in the long run. As you scale, money management becomes more complicated, but thankfully there are several different software for payroll, accounting, and bookkeeping that can help!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The onset of a New Year is often accompanied by an inordinate amount of pressure. From the onslaught of 30-day health and wellness challenges to the call to “be more productive,” it seems like we are constantly being asked to do more and be better. But what does “better” mean exactly? And who are we doing it for?  In today’s episode, we unpack how to create better habits that actually stick and discuss ways to bring positivity and intentionality to both our personal and professional lives. We discovered long ago that New Year's resolutions just aren’t designed for us and that everyone has a preference when it comes to building healthier habits. Tune in as we discuss everything from starting your morning with positive intentions to crafting a mission statement for your business, and much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anytime we have a big growth year, the year to follow is one to watch. It’s a lot of working on the business and less working in the business. We put systems back in place, bring operations up to date, and tackle all the things we were too busy to attend to the year before. We had to work some of this out while hiring seven employees. We find that identifying and communicating your focus for the year can make all the difference. One recommendation we have is to figure out whether you’re in a red, yellow, or green year. Do you need to stop and do the bare minimum, maintain what you have, or go big or go home? Whichever method you choose, it feels better to remind yourself that you intentionally chose this as you are making decisions throughout the year.  We mindfully decided that 2023 was going to be a yellow year for us. A year of maintenance; not to restructure, but to solidify existing structures and to solidify our team. We’re building a really strong foundation and creating a sustainable business. But what does it mean to focus on creating stability and maintaining what we have? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the process of reflecting on our mistakes and successes for 2022, we realized that all of the “mistakes” (except one) that we’ve made, we would actually classify as lessons-learned instead. So, in this episode, we go over the key lessons that we’ve learned this past year and some of our most memorable success stories. Overall, this year was very challenging but we are feeling so good about what we’re creating, who is along for the ride with us, and what 2023 holds!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent developments in the AI space are undoubtedly going to change our world. The most significant shift is the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which can create any content according to refined prompts. OpenAI has multiple other bots that utilize different databases, but ChatGPT is the one that got the most press and is publicly setting the precedent for what’s to come. We don’t believe that AI will take jobs immediately, but that it absolutely will in the long term. In this episode, we look at the impact of AI in the near future versus the long-term future, its implications and benefits, and the evolution of job creation in the new world! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Due largely to the media we’ve been consuming, attention spans are waning. Now, more than ever, we need to focus on concise communication at work so as not to waste time or lose focus, and to cater to neurodivergence. We recently had a conversation with our team about innovation, problem-solving, and presenting the root of those problems with solutions in a clear, concise way. The importance of utilizing meeting minutes as efficiently as possible is becoming more and more evident to us, and we want to promote the concise communication of new launch game plans, offers, marketing strategies, etc. This is a skill we could all use some practice in, and today’s episode is all about how to be more concise as a leader and how to train your team to identify and communicate the bottom line of their presentation and client communication. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We know that so many business owners at all stages of their growth do not understand their finances and we can see how much it affects their businesses! We want to talk about what understanding your numbers will do for you and why it’s such an important thing to prioritize. Often, the anxiety that discussing finances causes is rooted in a lack of financial literacy and the attachment we have to money that results in avoidance.  Sometimes these kinds of conversations will be uncomfortable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are bad. We want to remind you that our mission at Boss Project is to equip more women and femmes with the financial knowledge that they need to build a sustainable business that supports them financially and soulfully. These things are only possible with a level of financial literacy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would you do if your business disappeared overnight but your skills and experiences remained? How would you choose your product or service? Would you want to play a similar role? Should you even remain in the same industry? Today on the show we share our answers to all these complicated questions, and more, as we reflect on what we’ve learned from building a business and running it for almost ten years!  In our conversation, we reflect on the current economic climate, what we learned from starting a business during a recession, and what we would want from a second business after building a company based on passion from the ground up. Tune in as we indulge in a conceptual exercise examining what we’ve learned over the past few years and what we would do differently for our next business, and why!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we’re using you guys for practice. We have a workshop meeting coming up with the team at Boss Project to go over some updates we are doing to our team Wiki page, practices for problem-solving and other aspects, and we wanted to share some of that information with our listeners. Consider these the highlights of what we’ve learned about innovation, problem-solving and creative thinking. This episode is best suited if you also listen to our recent episode on the four types of problem solvers that you need in your team. You don’t necessarily need to listen to it first, but it will help you. In the last year, we’ve been able to put definition to the culture behind the scenes at Boss Project, making our mission and vision a more prominent part of the work that we do. We talked about creating a motto to highlight the areas we really want to enhance. How can you share your philosophy with your team in a meaningful way? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We usually share a free-balling, brain-storming episode around this time of year about what we want the next year to look like. We are so ecstatic (and intimidated) about some of our ideas and we want to document them for you all to hear! This year, we dove into having a hybrid company really heavily but going into 2023, we have to ask ourselves what the right mix is for our team.  We know how stressful it can be to figure out how projects are going to happen and we encourage you to plan for the new year with flexibility. Find the balance between having a plan and being flexible to allow for inevitable changes that you can’t predict. Be prepared that your plan may not happen exactly the way you want it to. Spend your planning time looking at where your leads are coming from and what makes sense for your business based on the leads that you have.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Podcast Description There have been a lot of conversations in our incubator coaching lately about what to do when leads are lower. But that’s only part of the conversation. Today, we want to focus on how to know what’s right when you’re considering different ideas to pursue. When we’re in a rut, we tend to think that it’s time to think far outside of the box. Innovation is amazing when you’re in a season to be able to create something new and it makes sense, but when you need a cash injection, or you want to start the year off with a bang, it’s not necessarily the best time to start with something brand new! What if, instead, you looked for ways to do the same thing, but in a different room? Could you do the same thing through a different lens? At the end of the day, if you already have systems and processes around the thing that you have been delivering, selling, and pricing, it’s so much easier to stay in that lane. Don't reinvent the wheel! While it might sound counterintuitive, we encourage you not to think outside the box, but to spin it in a different direction. It’s the same thing, just from a different viewpoint! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s episode is all about how to define your role in your company. As we look towards the start of a new year, we always like to comb through the job descriptions of the people on our team, as well as ourselves. What we’ve noticed is that defining the role of founders and CEOs is something that is often overlooked. So, we are intentional about taking the time to get really clear on the things that we need to do versus the things that we want to do so that we can find a healthy balance between the two!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are three things we’re eager to look into for 2023. The first being some version of the four-day workweek. For three years, we had Mondays off, but we reverted to five days a week as our business grew. Now we’re tentatively thinking about reintroducing the four-day work week, but a hybrid version of it, as we don’t want to put pressure on our team to have to hustle to get everything done over a shorter time frame. We’d like to tease a four-day workweek with the fifth day dedicated to creative work. The next is our team retreat. We are adamant about making it happen as in-person connections are irreplaceable. We want to give our team opportunities to bond without putting pressure on getting too much done.  Finally, we want to look at restructuring our department meetings (and meetings in general). Meetings impact the energy and productivity level of people differently and we want to make sure we’re using our time effectively. We have impactful, actionable meetings, yet they are still draining for a lot of our team. We want to honor everyone’s energy and find the balance of what supports both us and our team. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you dream of having a team full of problem solvers, you’ve come to the right place. In the previous episode, we talked about the four types of problem solvers that your team needs. In this episode, we investigate how to encourage your employees to be problem solvers in the first place. Efficiency is championed in the workplace, and the number one thing to get in the way of it is the brake of identifying and solving problems. For this reason, there is often a lot of resistance to turning the focus onto innovation. Yes, it takes time, but it’s worth it! Tune in to hear our advice on creating space for innovation and incentivizing problem-solving. We leave you with seven practical ways to promote a culture of creativity and innovation within your team! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We recently came across an article about the types of problem solvers (or innovators) that exist within a business. In this episode, we are going to be sharing a breakdown of this article. The idea is to encourage you, as a leader, to look at your team and determine whether it is diverse enough in terms of the perspectives and roles as well as whether it is cognitively diverse enough. This is such an important conversation because there are certain things that will be innately easy for some people and much harder for others and when you understand the dynamics of your team, everyone can help each other out. For anyone looking to grow their team in the coming year, this episode is for you!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you find hiring daunting? Do you want to find the right people that will grow your business but don't know how? Then this episode is for you! It’s been a minute since we’ve had a guest on the Strategy HourPodcast, but we absolutely had to bring our friend Abbey Ashley on so that you can hear more of what she's got going on with hiring, and get some tips from a multi million dollar CEO on how she has navigated hiring in her business, along with a few personal anecdotes from our experience over at BossProject. Abbey Ashley is founder and CEO of Hello Savvy, a new hiring platform that focuses on culture and community. She’s been named one of Forbes Next 1000 Up and Coming Entrepreneurs and Inc.Magazine’s Top 100 Female Entrepreneurs, and Hello Savvy’s sister company, the Virtual Savvy has been placed on Inc.’s 5000 List in 2021 and 2022, along with being named one of Inc.’s best places to work. With a focus on team culture and a ‘serve first’ motto among her team, her team went from 6 to 14 team members and over 3 million in annual revenue. Her passion is to help other entrepreneurs creatively carve out their own path forward via online business, and today we are talking about hiring well so that you can grow your business. We are sharing a lot of mistakes and some of the ways we needed to grow in order to fully step into our roles as leaders and co-founders. We touch on how to navigate some of the tough decisions that come with hiring, and how to truly understand your role as a co-founder and how that shifts as you hire, and how to do all of that while you focus on facts and feelings, which is something we love to do around here! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever felt that you’ve run out of boxes to check? It can feel unsettling not to be clear on what you should be pursuing, especially as you get older. We were pretty surprised to find out that most of the things we strive for as we age are actually developmental milestones. We learned that, with the passing of each decade, there needs to be a realignment to work toward a new set of goals. There’s a progression from building your career in your twenties, to finding life alignment in your thirties, connecting to passion and purpose in your forties, and building a legacy in your fifties and beyond. Striving to make these things a priority is a natural part of the life cycle.  We were also surprised to learn that one-third of Americans say that they would rather give up sex than their cell phones. What this tells us is that we are all pretty accustomed to hooking ourselves to other things. If we’re not busy, we’re on our phones. If we’re not on our phones, we’re watching TV. What would we want to do if we put down our phones a little bit more? That’s the part that so many women struggle with. We all want to have a life, but how many of us know what that would look like for us? We have conditioned ourselves to not be okay with being bored. But only in boredom, does creativity strike. What do you want your life to look like? Do you know what it looks like to slow down? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re sure everyone is familiar with the popular Netflix reality TV show, Love is Blind, but did you know that you can actually learn some tools for having successful conversations at your next networking event from the show? No, these conversations won’t end in a terrifying wedding whereby all your guests anxiously await the ‘I do’ or the ‘I don’t.’ However, you could stand to create incredibly meaningful professional relationships and even friendships. You will also develop your social skills and self-esteem which will have a positive impact on your business!  We know that networking events can be awkward, daunting, and straight-up terrifying and we want to help you find a way to strike up effective conversations with the right people. Although you may be tempted to word-vomit your elevator pitch, we have some better ideas that will lead to more authentic connections. In this episode, we break down how we can learn to have conversations again and conserve energy by interacting with the right people in the right roles. Tune in to find out how to know your type, know your limits, and know what you’re going into networking events for! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is not the first time we’re speaking about boundaries, and it won’t be the last. We love boundaries! They’re our favorite ‘B word.’ We like setting them, we like holding them, and we like helping other people set them. One thing we find interesting is that when we start the conversation about boundaries and we lovingly push our clients or our team to create, set, and hold a boundary, it can be triggering for a lot of people. That’s because it makes us reflect on toxic behaviors we have allowed or done or negative stories we have told ourselves about why we might need boundaries.  It typically falls into two camps: you’re either a people pleaser who feels like setting a boundary lets people down, or you’re a workaholic and boundaries lead you to question your work ethic. We recently discovered an article in the Harvard Business Review that made us think about boundaries in a new way. It gave us two categories for thinking about boundaries, and we want to walk you through each of them today.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have worked with many different service providers over the years. And in that time we’ve learned a great deal from their wide-ranging responses to any number of situations and scenarios that inevitably pop up with clients — be they totally bizarre or bordering on the mundane. In today’s episode, we take a closer look at how to deliver a sustainable client experience. One that is consistent from client to client and can be maintained and altered as your business grows and scales. When you’re in the thick of the behind-the-scenes work of running your business, it’s easy to lose sight of the client experience. This is why it’s so important to have systems in place that allow you to not only receive client feedback but to come up with solutions that are then seamlessly integrated into your business. We break down the most common issues we’ve seen service providers get stuck on and offer insights on how to fine-tune your internal systems for a unique client experience with staying power! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Creativity is generally associated with art, yet it encompasses so much more than that! Because of the narrow definition of creativity, the majority of adults feel out of touch with their creativity or devoid of it altogether! Studies show that it’s in our DNA to be creative. Yet, as we get older and are influenced by society’s limitations of what constitutes creativity, we fail to flex our creative muscle in a way that resonates with us as individuals. All of us are intrinsically creative, whether we’re artistic or not, and in this episode, we break down what creativity means to us and share tips for getting in touch with your creativity and helping others to do the same.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re nearing the end of 2022 and auditing season is upon us! The time is ripe to start looking at how you want 2023 to pan out personally and operationally within your business. We want you to conquer the world, so today, we’re going to share some tips for setting yourself up for success in the new year. Although auditing might not sound sexy, it’s one of our favorite things to do. In this episode, we share some of the strategies we’ve used over the years to carry out an effective audit. You’ll learn how best to take stock of which areas need tweaking in order for you to reach your goals in 2023! Bear in mind that this doesn’t have to be your final iteration but making decisions in advance and working backwards from your goal is essential. Tune in to find out how to identify your financial goal and gap, find a plausible method to fill that gap, and reach your goals! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The festive season is upon us! And for service providers that means navigating the immense pressure to take part in retail-centric holidays like Black Friday Sales. In today’s episode, we answer some of the most common listener questions that come up over the holiday season. Like how to handle pressures around Black Friday Sales, when to allow discounts, when free collaborations are worth it, and whether you should work with friends and family.  It may seem like the benefits of some of those things are worth it, but they also come with plenty of hidden costs. Tuning in you’ll hear us share some of the key things we’ve learned from working with relatives, taking part in Black Friday sales, and offering our services for free. These things are a lot more complicated than they seem at first glance! Today’s episode is all about uncovering the true cost of these kinds of discounts, optimizing your price plans, and learning how to give your time the value it deserves. Because if you’re going to spend time away from work, we want it to be spent regenerating and being present with your family, not chasing false leads! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been working with our clients behind the scenes and noticing some commitment issues when it comes to setting goals and deciding on how to reach them. On some level, the hesitation stems from perfectionism and feelings of Imposter Syndrome. But there’s more to it than that. Today we want to talk about an article that we read recently which delves into the things that we’ve been talking about for years, but from a different angle. Ultimately, perfectionism, Imposter Syndrome and all the related feelings come from a place of worrying about making the wrong decisions. So, we’re going to unpack the principles of creating a regret-free business and life!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It has been really interesting for us to see how centric defining our values has been in ultimately operating our team. We didn’t realize how much we relied on them until some things came to light with our clients. So, what are values to a company? We all understand what our values are in our personal lives, but when we start talking about business values, these things are often assumed. As you grow, you have to be incredibly strategic about identifying your values. We want to encourage you to identify three values that can help you get focused around how you are going to serve your clients. Asking questions about your boundaries and communication preferences, your work style and ethic, can lead to clarity around your business values. Having an internal value that is very specific around how your team runs is also critical to your culture. These values make it possible to get everyone on the same page and settle a lot of conversations around what should happen!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s talk about your website! The one place you can present the version of yourself and your business that is accurate, helpful, and actually effective for you and your business. Have you looked at it lately? We’re guessing that many of you have put your website on the backburner for the past few years; especially if you’ve been in business for a while. We’re also guessing that the reason you’ve done this is because you’ve been treating social media as your main marketing platform.  An important factor to consider is that when social media platforms change their algorithms (and your business doesn’t get as much traction as a result), people will go back and look at your website. If you haven’t been paying attention to your website, it’s not going to go down too well! We’re also guilty of not always paying attention to everything on our website, but there are certain things that we have never (and will never) stop doing. So, regardless of the last time you touched your website, we’re going to talk about how to get it back to the point where it best serves you. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Developing consistent client delivery is a surefire way to set your business up for success and today, we break down how best to do so. There are stages to this, especially if you’re a solopreneur offering a broad variety of services. The most important phase, for the purposes of today’s episode, is phase one. It’s important to spend time improving your processes and developing efficiencies from the get-go, as tedious as it may feel. The question we get asked the most in our trainings is about efficiency. The answer is uncomfortably obvious and it’s merely a matter of prioritization! Tune in to learn the simple art of tweaking and repeating and discover how best to create efficiencies for yourself while simultaneously optimizing the client experience! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s talk about communication! In the past, we’ve talked about how to plan for expected leave (like holidays and maternity leave), or how to deal with situations where you unexpectedly need to leave work (when you are sick or your child needs you, for example). Today, we’re discussing this topic, but from a different perspective. We want to talk about the internal structure of our team and how we set up meetings, communications, and different tools to help our team function optimally when we can’t be there. So much of it comes down to the fact that we don’t do anything in secret and always maintain consistency in the way that we show up at work. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a toxic culture rearing its head in the small business world– monitoring productivity. What’s the buzzword? Productivity Paranoia! That’s the fixation that leaders have with their employee’s work, which leaves them thinking way too much about how their staff is spending their time, and what the resulting output is. Today, we’re here to share how we monitor our teams without micromanaging them. We’ll talk about the effective systems we use to keep our team connected and all moving toward the same direction without any creepy stalking. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re talking about unanticipated leave! We’ve spent a good amount of episodes talking about how to prepare for maternity leave or a longer vacation or break, both of which are amazing! But for the most part, these are eventualities that you can anticipate and plan around. So what do you do to prepare for things that you can’t anticipate like family emergencies or medical leave?  This year we have both had major health challenges as well as family emergencies that left us unable to work for days and weeks at a time. These events were stressful in themselves. But had we not taken the necessary steps to prepare for unanticipated leave, things could have been a lot more dire and overwhelming, especially for our team. To find out whether you’ve prepared your business for unplanned time off, make sure you tune in for our breakdown on how to elevate your systems, build better communication, and plan for unplanned time off! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When prospective clients are on the fence or delaying commitment to a particular project, it can be wildly frustrating. Not just that, but the follow-ups use up a whole lot of unnecessary time and energy. In this episode, we share the exact scripts we use to nudge people off the fence and reduce communication delays. You are responsible for closing the loop, and it is especially critical when you start documenting your sales process and really tracking conversion rates. Reviewing your sales information is only helpful once you’ve closed the loop and are certain as to which leads are going to convert to sales and which aren’t.  Today, we are specifically addressing those waiting for their prospective clients to sign off on a project but are left without a clear answer. So many service providers struggle with non-committal potential clients who seem eager but never quite get around to closing the deal. If you’re holding a spot for someone and they haven’t committed, you need to solidify that space or move on. Our prospect follow-up scripts will help you close the loop and mentally move on. Tune in to find out how to restructure your process to reduce cumbersome delays, and kindly and effectively communicate your parameters!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a company, our mission is to help women create more financial freedom for themselves, which is why financial literacy is a foundational part of what we teach. And while we know it may be intimidating, taking action will give you fresh insight into your company, while also allowing you to make better decisions, and ultimately, save you money! From knowing your books to mastering your cash flow, it all starts with information. Understanding your numbers is the foundation. And the only way to be free to run your business effectively is by understanding how these all work together. Tune in today to learn how to get your company’s finances under control and empower yourself with the information that's going to help you build a truly sustainable business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we’re cutting the small talk and diving right into part 2 of our conversation. That’s how important we deem this topic to be. If you own a service-based business, there’s a high chance you’ve encountered a client who wants to change some aspect of your delivery. Usually, this comes up during the sales process, but occasionally it arises immediately after they’ve booked. Today, we’re talking about how to navigate this based on when and where they are wanting to customize the product, and how to handle it at each stage.  When clients feel that they can negotiate price, tinker with the scope, and haggle with you on the deliverables, what do you do? We’re here to help you navigate these complexities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re going to talk about the art of the follow-up! Once you’ve pitched your service, it’s possible that you’ll experience potential clients ghosting you, being passive-aggressive towards you, or fighting against the process that you’re trying to put them through. All three of those things have happened to us in the last seven days so we know all about those weird experiences. In an ideal world, people will seamlessly move through your sales process, discovery call, and pitch meeting, and then they’ll pay you. This happens almost half of the time but the other half of the time, you’ll be faced with resistance and objections that you’ll have to work through. Today, we’re going to talk you through how to deal with them! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Being a human being these days is undeniably stressful. We are constantly expected to function at our best while being endlessly bombarded with a million different things that are competing for our attention. Add social media into the mix and now you also have to deal with an onslaught of content about anything and everything, from how you too can achieve impossible standards of beauty to live feeds of devastating world events.  All of these rapid changes have had a tangible impact and are evident in the rising rates of depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental health issues. So how do you, as a leader, support your team in this climate of information overload and unprecedented global events? Tune in for a deep dive as we discuss the single most important skill for leadership, the research underpinning it, and why it will not only make you a better leader but also, a better person!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re in the final quarter of the year and it’s the perfect time to hunker down, focus, and refine. This is the season to investigate what’s working in your business and what’s not so you can make strategic and educated improvements going into the next year. In preparation, you’re going to need to start collecting data in order to identify your greatest areas of opportunity and gauge where to place your focus. This past week we walked through a quarterly optimization training with our clients, and today, we want to share some of the conversations we had there so you can learn from them and apply the takeaways to your own business. In this episode, you’ll find out how one of our clients increased her close rate by 40% and where she discovered she needed to place her focus once her sales process was in order. Tune in to find out which metrics are worth analyzing, how to pitch up to a planning session, and much more, including some tangible tips for improving your sales strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we want to share with you some behind-the-scenes live action of the “tweaking and repeating” that we do whenever we implement something new in our business. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve probably heard us talk about this concept before. As a refresher, “tweaking and repeating” means to take a particular action in your business for a set amount of time (at least 30 days) and then go back and reflect. Think about how it went, how it made you feel, and if there are any opportunities for you to pivot and improve what you’ve tried. Listen in as we discuss a rundown of our “tweak and repeat” process on something that we started exactly 30 days ago. We’re going to go through the results, the things we want to keep doing, and the things we want to change. We’re showing you an example, so that you can go through the same assessment process in your own business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A pitch deck and a proposal serve the same purpose, but they’re certainly not interchangeable. Simply put, a proposal takes everything mentioned in a long form pitch deck and distills it into a streamlined piece of communication to back up everything you have already mentioned and sold to your client. The response you’re seeking when you send this along is “Oh yes, this is what we discussed.” That’s why, when we hear that you’re sending off proposals without any previous communication, we get worried! People are skipping the communication altogether and putting together proposals without any setup. Could you still convert people by simply sending them an email? Yes, totally. Especially if you’ve done a lot of education on your website. But if there’s any confusion at all about what you do, without a presentation, you’re going to lose someone. This is a part of your process we really want you to start caring about. It’s an opportunity to stand out by going above and beyond what other service providers are doing.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The number one thing we are encouraging business owners to do right now is to be flexible. If you can adapt to the needs of the people you’re talking to, then you’re putting yourself in a great position to make sales and optimally serve your clients so that you can both succeed! But how do you reach those clients? And how do you demonstrate that you are the right person for the job? In today’s episode, we break down how to put together a fantastic pitch deck that will showcase your skills and leave your future clients feeling both inspired and excited. Putting together all the information you need for a pitch deck may seem overwhelming, but once you automate things it will make the process so much easier. We’re here to demonstrate how you can take a structured, predictable, templated approach, while also providing the space to customize your pitch for every client. So if you've been feeling like your process could use a little sprucing up, today’s episode is for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all known that kid at school. The one who completely takes over group projects and feels the need to micromanage every, single, little detail. If this sounds just a little too familiar, then you’re in good company! Being a perfectionist is tough, and it can come with a host of insidious bedfellows, like procrastination, self-doubt, and debilitating indecisiveness. But what if you could befriend your perfectionism, and make it your superpower?  While it’s undoubtedly challenging dealing with perfectionism, we want to propose imagining a new way forward that doesn’t rely on your self-doubt. What if, instead of beating ourselves up over our tendency towards perfectionism, we instead embrace the strengths we have to offer? After interfacing with countless clients who struggle with perfectionism we decided to come up with the Bust the Perfectionism Toolkit. This innovative toolkit is made up of easy-to-implement strategies that allow high-achieving business owners to tackle perfectionism once and for all. Tune in as we discuss the powers and pitfalls of perfectionism, and find out what you can expect from the Bust the Perfectionism Toolkit! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been alluding to all of our secret projects in the works for months now but haven’t yet spilled. We are simply dying to talk about the behind-the-scenes projects we’ve been working on, and you can expect an official announcement before this month’s end! Because we’re so close to announcing it, we thought we’d go ahead and let you in on a few of our secrets.  We’ve been working with clients for seven years now, and the past year has seen a bit of a shift. As you know, we’ve been banging on about refocusing on working with fewer clients and dipping our toes back into the service side of things, and now that we have an accountable team comprised of individuals with their own niche set of superpowers, we can! For the first time ever, we have a team that is not just there to support us in project management or client communication, but on deliverables, and it’s truly expanded the scope of what we can offer.  In this episode, you’ll hear about our evolution over the past seven years and get some insights into what we finally have the bandwidth to offer. If you’re looking to build a stable foundation for years to come and 10x your investment, you’ve come to the right place. We’re here to help you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The truth of the matter is that the market is shifting. As small business owners, we absolutely have to be paying attention because how this impacts us in the next few years is going to be really important. We all knew things would change after the pandemic, but two years later, we’re seeing the results in unexpected ways. There just isn’t a recipe anymore. Instead of following predetermined steps to success, we’re all having to figure it out as we go. The strategies that we all once relied on are no longer effective, and we can’t keep doing the same things and expecting to have more reach. Specifically, in the social media space, the strategies that used to bring success are far less effective on the organic side. It’s a gamble. As a result, businesses across the board are having a much harder time predicting where their attention needs to be, where it makes sense to allocate resources and time, and planning for the future of their business. The conversations we have been having with our clients and peers have confirmed that everyone is having a hard time figuring out where to put their focus, where to commit, and where to go all in. What is it going to take to ride the wave and see growth through this unpredictable time?  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Believe it or not, change and growth are possible without you being in a perpetual state of despair. Crisis can’t be the only impetus for scaling your business; we strongly believe that you can seek expansion when things are going well! In this episode, we break down the “Cycle of Despair” and the traps many service-based business owners fall into when they’re seeking to grow their businesses. If you are caught in the cycle of not having enough cash to bring in the support you need to land more clients and not enough clients to bring in the cash you need, we’re here to offer you a new approach. Join us today as we actively aim to reduce your despair, and put the scarcity mindset to rest. There are ebbs and flows to everything that we do; we can’t bypass the dips but we can reframe the way we think about them! To all you kickass business owners out there, tune in to find out how you can set the stress aside and enjoy the fruits of your labor! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All too often, business owners will be trucking along just fine, reaching their goals and generating profits, but that inner feeling of urgency never quite goes away. This is a little easier to justify early on in business. We think of this as the honeymoon phase, but for business. You see all this potential, and your vision is strong.  Growing something is way more exciting than maintaining something. We don’t give enough credit to the outside validation that you get when you first take the leap and start something new. Oftentimes, if you’re fueled by that, you end up staying significantly smaller than your potential because you keep starting over instead of adding or growing. Is there a better way to approach that feeling of wanting to start all over again?  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re collectively going through what is likely to be the next recession. Nobody has officially called it yet, but it seems to us like that’s the direction we’re heading, or that we’re already in it. Because many other people feel the same way, they are changing their behaviors. So, today we are going to be talking about what it looks like to recession proof your business!  Maybe you weren’t in business during the last recession, so you don’t know what to expect, or you’re used to consistent success, so the slower market has come as a bit of a shock; whatever situation you’re in currently, we’re going to make you feel more at ease and give you some practical advice for how to approach the coming months and years.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. We mentioned: https://www.indeed.com/strategyhour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finding joy in your work is a wonderful thing. It can energize you, further your drive, and help you push through challenging tasks and deadlines. But it can also have a detrimental effect. Many of us have fallen into the trap of trying to get all our meaning and joy from one source, whether it’s your partner or your company. The problem with that is that it puts untenable pressure on the people we love the most. It can also cause us to neglect other parts of ourselves, leaving us devastated and adrift when we no longer have the partner, or job, that defined our identity. Today on the show we delve into the consequences of finding joy in your work. We discuss some of the common traps people fall into when their actions aren’t in alignment with what they want, and how to do the difficult, introspective work of uncovering our true needs and aspirations. Tuning in you’ll learn about the biggest obstacles we’ve seen clients face, and how we can help you overcome them. We also discuss how to find more time in your life and identify exactly what you want for your future self! Join us today for key insights into these important topics. Discover the consequences of finding joy in your work and learn how you can achieve balance and meaning in all areas of your life! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. We mentioned: https://www.indeed.com/strategyhour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is only one resource that you can’t get back and we’re willing to hazard a guess that you already know what it is. The good news is, it is renewable in the sense that you can plan to save more of it in the future! You guessed it, we’re talking about time. Usually, when you start a business, you have way more time than money. As a result, you tend to be more generous with the former, committing every spare moment to building. Often, your business grows, and your approach doesn’t change. You’re still working nights and weekends to make up for the deficit that no longer exists. There have been various moments in our own journey where we’ve taken stock of what the business is and isn’t doing for us, and where we can free up some time. The mistake we often see people making is that they tend to forget that investing their own time is worth way more than the cost of outsourcing certain tasks to someone else and paying for it. We’re here to tell you it’s okay if you don’t know how to invest your time wisely! There are actual steps that you can put in place to learn how to do that more efficiently to literally save you money and time in the future.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the last three to six months we’ve been hearing a common complaint from business owners that they need more leads. Guys, quit panicking. There are a few market shifts that we need to be aware of, but they’re not necessarily changing how you’re going to acquire clients. Everything with clients may feel like it’s changing but in fact, everything is the same! We’re serious; everything is the same.   Marketing is cyclical. You’re going to have something that works now that may not work in 6 months, and then in 2 years, that thing could come right back around again! There are also things that are a common thread forever and always; spoiler alert: it’s relationships. Then there’s going to be hotspots, and what you really shouldn’t do is build a business that relies on these “blips.” Marketing is coming back to its root a bit, shedding things that don’t work, and bringing things back that have been buried for a while. If you’re interested in everything we have to say on this topic, tune in today!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not everything we do at Boss Project is something we recommend to our clients, even though it may have worked for us. For example, we don’t encourage a lot of folks to replicate our partnership model. Oftentimes, you can actually get what you want by following an entirely different path to the one we took to get there. Another example of this is reaching seven figures. Is there a way for you to achieve the life and lifestyle you’re looking for without the challenges that come with adding a zero to your revenue? We’ve been there, and we have the insight to tell you what the journey looks like. What we’ve found is that people’s desires are often much closer to their current reality than to a reality that they don’t yet have. What’s hard to manage is that as your reality changes, so do your desires. If one of your biggest motivators to achieve seven figures is just to be able to say you did, that’s totally okay! We’re here to validate that. But we’re also here to talk to you about what you can realistically expect from that experience.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s dive into our fourth and final part of the epic series that is absolutely going to transform your life and your business! Today, we fill you in on a few critical insights into building the perfect team to help you scale. We’ve saved this one for last because, without creating structure, you can’t start building a team, but once you’re ready, you’ll find it to be an incredibly powerful tool to take you to the next level (if you get it right!). If you’ve skipped a few steps and already have a team of employees, never fear, it’s never too late to improve upon your current systems. Not every piece has to be perfect but when it comes to hiring, the more you know, the more equipped you’ll be to face whatever comes your way. And that’s what we’re here for! In this episode, you'll learn all about hiring for attitude, designing a well-integrated employee system, defining your priorities and hiring accordingly, refining your team, productizing your offer, and so much more! You won’t want to miss this one. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to part three of our series on the four things every service provider must get right. In today’s installment, we’ll be delving into one of our favorite topics here at Boss Project: designing your systems for structure.  Most of our clients deliver a service that requires their clients' contribution. This means they usually need input from clients before they can take the next step in their process. Unfortunately, they often aren’t able to systematize a process, because they’re spending most of their time and energy chasing people down all the time! In today’s episode we delve into how to create systems that support you, the impact it will have on your operations, and why it’s all about spending more time with your clients, not less! We want to help you align the goals and values of your business with the systems you put in place. Our approach is all about how to create structure while taking into account the messiness of life, clients, and running a service-based business. Tune in today as we break down how to design your systems for structure and serve your clients to the best of your ability! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In part two of our series on the four things every service provider must get right, we’re talking about money! Particularly, we are talking about profitability. If you want a business that allows you to sleep and see your friends, and maybe even take a vacation, you need to be paying attention to the piece of your business that determines if your deliverables are profitable. What does it take to really run your service fully? Can you identify what projects are bringing in the most profit for your business? Do you operationally know where you might have some of those ‘cherry on top’ niceties that you might be able to fund in a different or unique way? At the end of the day, if you don’t have money to fund the business that you are running, you are not going to have a business to run. We want you to not only have a business to run, but we want your business to fund the life that you want to have, and that’s literally our whole mission over at Boss Project!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are bringing you a series! It’s going to be a four-part series dropping on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next two weeks. In it, we’re going to be covering the four things that a service provider must get right. The reason why we’re launching this particular series is because we’re surprised year after year about the lack of higher-level resources geared towards the tens of thousands of people who listen to this show, namely established business owners who are looking to figure out their next move for their business so that they can level up. So, we’re creating those foundational resources for you in the form of a podcast series. We’re so excited to dig in, come join us!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of us, as service providers, need to be reminded of the importance of gauging whether we are, perhaps subconsciously, tying our personal identity and self-worth to what we bring to the table for our clients. There have been some conversations popping up recently in which very successful service providers have been wondering why certain clients are not listening to their every word or taking their professional advice. They are made to feel both frustrated and insecure, as they recognize the clients aren’t going to see the results they’re able to procure for them because they refuse to adhere to the strategy. We, personally, are not immune to these thoughts, and today, we want to share our personal experience and some exercises to help you dispel imposter syndrome and communicate clearly and calmly with clients who won’t hear you out. It’s time to actively separate your self-worth from your work and quit taking on your clients’ “emergencies!” Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our very first absolute priority when it comes to our business values, is building a business that is life first. To us, that means that our business structure reflects the season we are in. Seasons can be short or long, but they are intentional choices. You can choose to work full time, build a business, and still respect life first.  What this looks like for us, is allowing ourselves plenty of flexibility even while working full-time hours. When we chose to do business this way, we structured our days in a way where we could still prioritize family and life over work. How it looks is not the point, how it is communicated, and how it is honored, are! Life first looks completely different in every different context - what our team looks like when we’re working, what our team looks like when we are not working. Open and early communication is the essential building block for a life-first business to thrive.  We’ve made it a rule that every single employee has to take both their birthday and their anniversary off from work. That’s just one example of how we’ve built the life-first value into our business, and we’re proud of it! Building a life-first business can look any way you want it to, and it can be the little things, and ultimately our goal is that you have the freedom to choose what you want to prioritize and how that works.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For those of you who have reached the point of hitting your first or second six figures and are beginning to tap out of what you personally do within your business, there’s a conversation that needs to be had. A lot of people decide to ditch their current offers for an entirely different set of offers because they think that’s the only way to move up, however, we think pricing is a great opportunity to expand. Oftentimes, the clients that work with us in the Incubator are able to work with fewer people and make more money, if they’re priced appropriately. But something we don’t see happening as much as it should, is people moving to a premium pricing model to set them up to grow their team. Tune in to discover how to grow your team ethically, calculate appropriate service pricing, and why you might be pricing inappropriately, to begin with! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show, notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Goal setting forms an integral part of any business. It serves as a guide for your overall vision and can help you persevere, especially when things get tough. But how do we choose our goals? And how do we fully recognize when we’ve obtained them? Too often, we’ve seen clients achieve incredible things only to find themselves unable to appreciate their accomplishments, simply because the reality doesn’t exactly match what they envisioned. This is why, today on the show, we are revisiting our conversation on goal setting and how to appreciate our accomplishments! We dig into the forces that influence what we envision for ourselves, and how holding onto a particular resolution can undermine our current achievements. Learn how practicing gratitude with intention can help you appreciate your current circumstances and how shifting your perspective to your past self can make you thankful for all that you have! We also share what we learned from a recent interview with a Former FBI Hostage Negotiator about why humans are hardwired to focus on the negative and how to gain perspective. Uncovering what we truly want takes time and work and appreciating what we have takes gratitude and intention. Tune in as we delve into these important topics and the role they play in your life and business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming your way today is a mix of math and anticipatory mindset work! It’s all through the lens of, “This is what you actually want.” We’re going to lay out the future a little bit for you so that you can start to understand what’s coming and that you can stop stressing about it! We’re seeing hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are constantly apologizing for doing things they don’t want to do. After today, we want you to understand why you shouldn’t be feeling bad about things like not posting consistently on social media, and what you should be putting energy into instead! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would it look like to remove yourself from the parts of the business that you should remove yourself from? And which parts should you never remove yourself from? Are there opportunities you’re ignoring because of this? When you give up these things, we can only imagine that, in your heart of hearts, you want to lean more into the CEO role - you just don’t know yet exactly what you’re supposed to be doing with that time. But once you know more about what’s required of you within that role, you might find the motivation to let go of these other parts of the business, and by doing so, gain some very precious time back! The number one thing that will help you and your business to take on more clients, is to have doers who can take on more client delivery. The parts of the business that you are resenting most at the moment might only be that way because you are feeling strapped for time. Ask yourself: Where would you shine best if you had the time? If you could design a CEO or creative director role for yourself, what would that look like? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we’re going to fill you in on our hot take on setting goals! We are now seven years into our business and have hit tremendous milestones. That being said, our feelings towards goals have evolved over time, and we’re about to give you some insight into our retrospective thoughts on setting them, not setting them, and whether we feel worthiness is connected to them. For six-figure earners who want to continue to scale their business, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen in terms of your relationship with goals, and we’re here to tell you what that is! Tune in to hear our current take on goal setting, and find out about the TikTok that inspired this conversation. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s taken us over a year to understand how our roles as co-CEOs of our company are different from the other aspects of our jobs and what exactly a CEO actually does. We’re still in the process of figuring out how to balance being CEOs, managers, and “doers” but we’re getting there! In this episode, we will be talking about what being a CEO entails, the tasks you should always be in control of, and those which you can delegate to other team members at a certain point along your journey. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking to hundreds of people on a regular basis about their business has given us so much insight into which structures work for which industries. It’s what positions us to advise clients entering the incubator who find themselves at a fork in the road of how to move forward. We want to give you some guidance, and let you know what we would do if we were in your shoes.  None of these options are wrong, it’s all centered around what works best for you, what feels fun, and what facilitates you playing to your strengths. There are plenty of scenarios that work amazingly for some people and don’t work at all for others. The question to focus on is not what is right, and what gets the greatest return, but what feels attainable for you. If something is not in step with who you are as a person, it’s not going to work! More often than not, it comes down to the question of whether you have set yourself up to be successful within the options that you have available, and the limitations that they present. Maybe you need to pivot, maybe you need to reassess your offer, maybe you need to reach a new audience, or maybe, you need to re-adjust your expectations. These are the conversations we are having a lot with our audience, and we never get tired of them!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This year, for the first time ever, Boss Project is taking a summer break! We’ve taken vacations in the past, and while we’ve navigated time off before, this time is different. This year we have a full staff of nine employees, who will all be taking time off, and the company will be closed for two entire weeks! In today’s episode, we walk you through the steps we’ve taken to prepare for our time off and show you how any business can prepare for a substantial and regenerative summer break.  Tuning in you’ll hear us break down how we’ve structured our work and our launches around designated time off, why we chose to do it this way, and what we’re planning to do for our break. We unpack some of the logistical steps we’re taking to maintain communication while we’re off, and why we wanted to prioritize our staff and give everyone a chance to rest and get away from it all. Thank you for joining us as we prepare for our summer break and discuss what it means to be a life-first business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to cultivate a culture of curiosity? That’s what we’re going to be discussing today! “Culture of curiosity” isn’t just a fun phrase. It starts with the way you talk about your work with all the people who are in your support system. It should be all-encompassing because if you use different language with different people it can derail you (in our opinion). One of the very first switches that we made when we were first growing our team was to speak openly with our team members about the things that we used to only speak about during our private conversations. As soon as we started thinking out loud, and sharing our fears and excitement with the people around us, they could see the evolution in our thought patterns which is such a valuable and inclusive tool!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many times have you struggled to make a decision in business out of fear that you’d make the wrong decision? What if instead you viewed every decision as an opportunity to learn rather than succeed or fail? Today on the show we unpack what it means to have an experimental mindset, how to foster that for yourself and within your team, and how it can free you from regret and help you make decisions that will help you learn and grow. Tuning in you’ll get a taste of what we've been chatting about with our clients inside the Incubator; from how unrealistic expectations can warp your mindset, to how to figure out what you really want. We’ve seen so many of our clients struggle to react to both success and failure and as a result, we wanted to discuss examples of actionable strategies. Learn what you can implement within your company and your team so that if you're in a similar situation, you have strategies to help you adapt to any situation!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are going to have a fabulous conversation! When working with our current clients inside The Incubator we always talk about levers. What lever do you need to pull in order to get the result that you want? There aren’t actually that many levers that you have the option of pulling but people like to complicate things. We are here to simplify them for you! Sometimes the things that people think they need to do to scale and grow are actually just the opposite of what they should be doing.  This conversation is all about what you should be thinking about before you start scaling. We want to give you insights into what scaling looks like in reality, so that you can decide if scaling your business really is something you want to do at this current stage of your journey.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As much as we’d love to wave a magic wand and bestow confidence upon others, unfortunately, confidence isn’t something you can gift to other people. It’s often so much easier said than done, but we’ve whittled down a list of things you can do to create your own confidence if you weren’t naturally born with it or nurtured in that area! Confidence can be created, it can be learned. In this episode, we look at how our respective upbringings allowed us to forge confidence and create the lifestyles of our choosing, and how you, too, can nurture your confidence and change your beliefs! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you’re trying to express a complex psychological feeling or event, but you aren’t familiar with the agreed-upon terms that experts use to describe it, the experience can be incredibly isolating. Today on the show we discuss a recent conversation we encountered that unpacks the differences between having a cognitive bias towards either action or thinking, and the consequences of that bias.  Anyone who has spent some time listening to our show will likely be familiar with the terms being a ‘doer’ or a ‘be-er’. Tuning in, you’ll hear us discuss how being a doer correlates with a cognitive bias towards action while being a be-er strongly resembles having a cognitive bias towards thinking. We also cover some of the traps that action takers can fall into, including hasty decision making, and why you need to be able to take action while also making time to process and strategize. Tune in for a breakdown of these fascinating topics, as well as insights into some of the steps you can take to shape your cognitive bias! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A common thread that we’ve been noticing is that so many business owners we deal with have excelled in most facets of their life for a long time, but then all of a sudden they’ve hit a wall which has made them start to second guess everything they’ve done in the past, including their ability to be a business owner going forward.  When you get to the point where you realize you are working hard and not reaping the rewards that would make it worth it and you’re feeling stuck about how to change that, we have the solution: The Incubator! When you’re deeply involved in something, it can be really difficult to understand how you can tweak it to make it work better for you. We can provide you with that perspective.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The theme of needing more time is a common one that we are seeing amongst our clients, which is why we started off today’s conversation with a discussion about gardening and candle making! Our thoughts on this topic have changed a lot over the last 6 months because of the unexpected outcomes that we’ve witnessed, and we want to share them with you. Our advanced training is called “How to Double Your Income by Working 20 Hours a Week or Less.” Service providers, we see you, we know you’re burnt out, and our goal is to help you make more money and get your time back! Our strategy works, we have proof through the lives that have been changed as a result, so come and see how it can change your life too!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to: thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The current market is shifting. There’s no doubt about it. What do you think the future of marketing looks like online? Maybe we’re at the next stage of marketing, and the next iteration hasn’t revealed itself yet. A lot of the things that people consider ‘marketing’ may not even be helpful for the majority of service-based business owners. For the majority of you, marketing is a huge distraction! It’s also an ego-killer.  Watching other businesses on social media can lead us to feel despondent about our skills and what we have to offer. It can lead us to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves. Vanity metrics aren’t helpful, but is traditional marketing even helpful? Can it help to an extent? Sure. But is it even necessary? For a lot of people, the answer is no. If you’re passionate about marketing, go for it! But what we suggest is to disconnect the line between social media, and sales. The role of Instagram and Facebook is totally changing, and fading out for small businesses, in the sense that we know it.  If you’re a service-based business provider, if you’re going to do anything, post a few times a month so that clients can see that your business is active. It’s not that we’re against marketing, we both come from a marketing background. It’s just that we believe that there is an easier way! There is a way to be mentally healthier by investing in relationships, beyond marketing.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to: thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ‘work smarter not harder club’ tells you that the only way to work smarter, not harder, is to have a low-priced digital offering, and all of a sudden all your dreams of riches will come true. Fact: the reality is you will actually end up working harder, not smarter! We believe in customizing your approach to your business in order to scale. This is something we talk about in the Incubator, and the amount of compliments we get out of the gate is nothing short of impressive. If you’re accepted, you’ll get access to some of our best tradings, to help you to double your income by working twenty hours or less per week. Our goal is to never make anything ‘one size fits all.' Making these decisions by yourself can be so scary. And if you don’t feel comfortable, and the people in your current circle can’t serve you in that way, it’s time to outsource! When you put too much emphasis on other people’s opinions, you are going to get answers guised with keeping you safe. The Incubator’s goal is to show you the options, and the consequences, and then you get to choose what’s right for you.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of us have a set of preconceived notions about what it takes to grow and scale our businesses. We’re often convinced that in order to make more money we need more clients, which means we need to grow our team. But we can’t grow our team until we have more money. The situation can feel impossible and even send you on a doom-spiral of dread. But it doesn’t need to be this way! Sometimes all you need is a new perspective and a gentle nudge in the right direction. In today’s episode, we share the incredible story of our wonderful client, Bonnie.  We unpack how the Incubator Program helped her understand her business, readjust her pricing structure, and transform her life and her company in the process. We take a deep dive into the preconceived notions around growing and scaling your business, and how small shifts can bring about dramatic changes. Discover how Bonnie managed to double her revenue in five months, find ease within her business, and take a 10-day vacation in Costa Rica, without a laptop! We’ve loved seeing the Incubator community grow, and it’s so rewarding to see members flourish, share, and support one another. Tune in to learn more about the program and how it helped Bonnie transform her business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Having discovery calls, going for coffee dates, and holding pitching meetings with potential clients is something that we’ve noticed that many service-based business owners struggle with in the early years. They feel like they either don’t say enough or they say too much, and this causes a lot of stress and anxiety. In this episode, we want to equip you with the confidence to go into these scenarios feeling like you know exactly what you’re doing! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After serving clients one-on-one, we ultimately changed the entire landscape of our business, yet we didn’t even realize that’s what we were doing! If we could go back in time, there are so many things we would do differently, and today, we’re going to share them with you. When we got to a certain stage of business, we froze up and felt like we were on an island. We had no idea what the next step should be and it felt like everyone else had all of the answers. So many of our clients reach the same phase where they hit a milestone marker and feel like there's something that they’re missing, like a missing piece of information; a formula, or a blueprint.  If you feel like million-dollar businesses are gatekeeping this information, the truth is, some of them are! If you’re at the stage of hitting a quarter of a million dollars and don’t know where to go from here, we’re here to tell you. Consider us your Fairy Godmothers of Business Past, telling you your future so you can really decipher what you want to focus on in this phase! Tune in to find out which things you’re tying to success that need to be let go. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As most of our listeners at Boss Project know, Abagail is our CFO and sits in HR as well. She has worked hand in hand with plenty of amazing people in HR to learn about the hiring process for a company. She has single-handedly shifted her team from just Emylee and Abagail to exploring contractors, part-time employees, full-time employees, and pretty much everything in between! Inside the incubator, she has started to have conversations about hiring, and she has plenty of wisdom to share from all of this experience.  Most business owners struggle with follow-through. The reason why Boss Project has been successful is that where Abagail struggles to see things through, Emylee excels! This formula, along with having the team to support it, has been a winning recipe for us. If you’re a solo business owner, you could be leaving money on the table for this reason. That’s where the magic of having help, even for ten to fifteen hours a month, comes in.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don't have to be good at everything you try. And you don't have to only do things that you’re good at. As kids, we’re often far more comfortable with experimentation and trying new things, than we are as adults. When we get older we increasingly feel pressured to stick with what we’re good at and not ‘waste our time’ on things that aren’t directly related to productivity. For perfectionists, it can be particularly difficult to try new things, which can have an adverse effect on decision making abilities.  The term consequences might be rife with negative connotations, but we’re determined to take it back and make it a neutral word! Examining the potential consequences of our decisions is hugely valuable. It can help us determine what we want and fully understand what each choice can offer us. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will work for everyone, nor should there be. Many of us think we should be pursuing relentless growth because that’s what the world tells us we should want, but when you consider the consequences of constantly scaling it becomes apparent how unrealistic (and unpleasant!) that is. Tune in today as we discuss how to unpack the consequences of our decisions, how to make choices based on the season of your business, and much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re going to talk about offering too many services and how to transition out of your Cheesecake Factory phase, namely, having way too many items on your menu. In a recent episode, we discussed narrowing down your services, and what it would look like to have conversations with your existing clientele about changing their service or potentially even eliminating their service altogether. Today’s episode is for those of you who are too scared to even consider this option! Tuning in you’ll hear us tackle how to make this transition and why it doesn’t need to entail massive sacrifices. We realize that everyone has different needs and limitations. So whether you want to make your transition in twelve days or twelve months is completely up to you! In our conversation, we break down how to streamline your packages by asking yourself the right questions and what you should know about clients when creating your offers. We also talk about the immense possibilities that open up from living in your expertise, and what it means to make your life your career. If you can't even imagine reducing the number of options you have available to your clients and want to discover how to overcome your fear, then this episode is for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aside from our wonderful clients in the incubator, our DMs have been popping and we have so many great insights into the hurdles that service-based businesses are facing! One particular issue that continues to pop up, especially as we help people define a high-touch signature service or ultimately focus on a more primary offering (instead of having what we’ve lovingly called the Cheesecake Factory menu of offers), is the need to eliminate other services. Many people we’ve run into are open to the idea but have active clients utilizing those very services and don’t know how to make that transition. The question arises of how to pivot and how to communicate the changes, but the main risk factor that people dwell on is losing the income from those active clients. Well, in this episode, you’ll find out how to gently ease out of specific services with a transition plan, as well as how to inform your clients that you’re eliminating part of their service and raising their price. Tune in to hear why there is no question that you shouldn’t only offer the services you want to and how to get to a point where you’re billing ethically and creating space for rest and creativity! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are so pumped to tell you the story of Krystina, a member of our community who has managed to get back nine full-time weeks of work at a mind-blowingly minimal cost! To set the stage, our advanced training promise is to help you make more money and work less. We’re helping you to design a life-first business and be more intentional about your hours. How you spend that time is ultimately up to you. The way we work and hustle with intention, launch, serve, grow, or reset is all based on the life-first bubble. This means that there are dedicated times for work and free times to either introduce more growth or introduce rest and, if there’s one thing we want our clients to walk away with, it’s the empowerment to choose what to use that time for. In this episode, we not only share Krystina’s result but the full circle moment she had around how she gained that time, so make sure to tune in today! The Cost-Benefit Analysis Required To Make Informed Decisions It is super important to price appropriately, based on your goals and the unique amount of time you have. At first, Krystina was resistant to making adjustments to her price point, but when she decided to set a minimum event cost, it totally changed the game. She’s now in her second year of working with us and in her first year, she increased her business by over 1,200 percent. Keeping the opportunity cost in mind is crucial; everything has risk and reward. If you have a product priced at a specific price point, you know what it could bring in for a certain amount of clients. But there’s also time associated! You need to gauge how much time is your time worth, doing one activity over another. Time can trick you though, and it’s not always apples for apples. What feels quicker and easier might not be the best use of your time. Krystina had inquiries sitting on her desk with an average order of only $200 but, by setting a minimum rate, Krystina realized that she could replace over 20 of her current clients and save nine full-time weeks of work! What You CAN Choose To Spend Your Time On As Soon as You Unlock More of It We all have the same amount of time in a day but we all have different constraints. In Krystina’s case, there are so many things she could use her time for now that it’s been opened up! She has a whole 360 hours to either land more high-touch signature service clients, focus on scaling systems, or take some time off! If important aspects of running your business are being sidelined, it’s because your time isn’t being used appropriately. Krystina was instantly able to reprioritize with her assistant, email past clients, reset priorities and goals, write content, and so much more! The Assembly Line Mentality We Need To Shift We were brought up in a working-class economy with a focus on production and service. We’re the byproduct of the assembly line culture of the 50s, but we are not machines; we are humans! We need time, rest, and different types of work. The trick is finding a balance between check-the-box activities and strategy. The power is in the numbers! The data will empower you to make the right decisions and assign your time appropriately. How To Get Your Time Back If you’re looking into getting some of your time back, the solution is as simple as applying for the Incubator! Our superpower is helping you to figure out what your actual goals are, what you’re working with now, and bridging the gap! See the full show notes here!   KEY TOPICS:  Time management Cost-benefit analysis Opportunity cost Saving time Reprioritizing Life-first business WE MENTIONED: Co-op Boss Project Incubator   The Nugget Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have now done multiple callouts, promotions and launches of the Incubator. We've had hundreds of applications and we’re working with incredible clients inside the program. And if you’re not one of them, you should be! If you’re scared to start a conversation with us, you need to get rid of that feeling right now because we are really not scary at all. You can literally ask us anything, we have no boundaries when it comes to helping our clients. We’re here to help you change your business for the better, so don’t waste any more time stuck where you are! Inspirational Client Stories We had a client who was doing a variety of copywriting tasks and charging a flat rate. When she did an audit on how much time she was spending on the tasks, she realized how little money she was actually making per hour. After raising her prices for just one of her recurring clients, and letting go of the ones who were paying pennies, she completely replaced her previous salary! Another client of ours took on a major 6-month job in the safety and emergency management space, and although she was terrified of raising her price for an additional piece of work they needed, her client didn’t even bat an eyelid! You shouldn’t be measuring your success on the number of clients you work with; quality is far more important than quantity. The Danger of Making Assumptions We’ve all done it; we make assumptions about what our clients are willing to pay, we think conversations about raising prices are going to be awkward and uncomfortable and we’ll lose clients as a result. Why do we do this? Because of fear and anxiety. Anticipatory stress is paralyzing and we have to be able to look at it and understand where the response is coming from, and then address it head-on, even though we may be tempted to avoid it. You’re going to continually be facing so many different choices in your business, and as we have learned from experience, the best discoveries will usually be found on the other side of fear! Regardless of where you’re at on your journey of making a decision about pricing, we encourage you to just take the next step and sign up for the Incubator!  See the full show notes here!   KEY TOPICS: Business Books Pricing Change Overcoming Fear WE MENTIONED: Co-op Boss Project Incubator   The Nugget Podcast  Dubsado REWORK  Good to Great  The Last House on Needless Street The Droupout The Ultimatum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Referrals are, without a doubt, one of the hottest topics that we have going on inside our world. We are so intentional about you doing business the easiest way possible without having to invest in huge ad spends, or allocate loads of money to marketing budgets, or focus on growing an absurdly huge social media presence. We really want you to focus on connections instead. The vast majority of our clients get booked out with almost exclusively referrals, and as they grow they start experimenting with different strategies. Today, we want to talk about ten ways to get more referrals in your world. A referral lead is just as real a lead as a stranger! Quit downplaying the quality and impact that referrals can have on your business, just because they felt easier to get. Referrals, by and far, are better quality, will pay better, will be easier to work with, will finish their projects faster, and they also know other dreamy clients which they may end up connecting you to. It literally only takes one dreamy client to connect you to a network of other dreamy clients, and the clients that we see who use that route, reach their goals way more easily, and are happy in their day-to-day business. See the full show notes here!   KEY TOPICS: Referrals Budget Social Media Networking Relationships Industry Standard   WE MENTIONED: Co-op Boss Project Incubator   The Nugget Podcast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spring has indeed sprung and apart from our gardening rituals, we have so many new things happening in the Boss Project world! The most pressing news on the street for the month of April 2022 is we have completely exploded the Creative Template Shop and it is officially available as its own entity on all platforms! As you guys have noticed, the conversations here at Boss Project have up-leveled as our business and our clients’ businesses have up-leveled, yet our educational spirit lives on and we want to keep providing actionable, bite-sized, tutorial content for growing business owners.  Our goal is to help you see quick wins with our incredible templates, marketing, and strategy. Join now on creativetemplateshop.com with discount code SAVE20 to save on our annual membership, and stay tuned for tips on how to realign expectations of scope with existing clients and how to get clear on creating a business for yourself rather than a job! In this episode, you’ll also discover the most common admin or general VA issue that arises when it comes to providing results for clients. See the full show notes here! KEY TOPICS: Up-leveling Setting Boundaries Realigning Expectations Service Provider Service-Based Business Hiring Contractors WE MENTIONED: Co-op Boss Project Incubator   The Nugget Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re a true crime fan and you enjoy a scandalous story about fraud, you’ve definitely spent some time thinking about people who are bigger visioning. These are people who started by looking at the end result, instead of asking themselves what they can do today. While we’re definitely not advocating for crime, we totally believe that there’s great benefit to be had when you consider the big picture of your business! Legacy planning doesn’t mean you’re not invested in your business today; it just means you’re building with the future in mind, and that can only benefit you, both today AND in the long term. We’ve seen people invest so much into their business only to realize that the success of their business rests solely on their ability to keep it afloat. Creating systems, training staff, and starting with the end in mind are all powerful tools to help your business to thrive even once you have made your exit. We’re in the business of helping you to make the changes you need to make to create a sustainable business plan that will enable you to thrive today, and to continue to flourish after you eventually leave! So, tune in today to find out more about creating a retirement plan for your business! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As owners and CEOs, we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but we’ve also learned a lot from them. In today’s episode, we discuss some of the mistakes we’ve made, as well as the errors we’ve seen TONS of CEOs make over the years. So, if you recognize any of these in yourself, don’t worry, you’re in good company! Tuning in, you’ll hear us break down the 7 most prominent red flags and toxic behaviors that continue to happen in business. Learn how to recognize them, why they happen, and the tiny course corrections you can make to solve them. The things that we are pointing out today are based on specific lessons we’ve observed throughout our careers. We’ve seen these errors play out in various ways, from friends who have needed to course-correct, to mistakes that we have inadvertently made in our own business. We’re taking this as an opportunity to share our knowledge so that you can become aware of these potential pitfalls and hopefully skip them altogether!  Stepping Into Your CEO Seat  In our opinion, the general conversation around stepping into your CEO seat has come with some flaws. Not only has it predominantly been discussed through a very gendered lens, but it has also been structured as a false dichotomy where there’s a wrong and a right way to do something when in truth there are many nuanced approaches one can take. We’ve learned repeatedly in business, even at the CEO level, that you have to find what works for you, and what’s in alignment with your goals. There are universal traits that we’ve recognized that hold people back from really thriving in their CEO seat in a way that is good for them.  How Much Time Do You Really Have?  You are, to some extent, lying to yourself about your time. This one is super common, but don’t worry, if you ask the right questions, you can start getting back your time and working in your zone of genius! First ask yourself, where is your time actually the most beneficial, and by that we mean, where exactly is your zone of genius? What is the number one thing that is delivering client results? Ask yourself what is truly resulting in sales in your business. Think about the environment and perspective that helps you live in your zone of genius most effectively. Maybe you need to carve out quiet time for yourself every morning that’s conducive to operating in your zone of genius. Perhaps you’re already spread way too thin and you need to accept that there are some things you won’t have time for, or that you need to give yourself permission to get something done at a much slower pace. We also talk about: You Can’t Just Wear Your Owner Hat Are You Delegating Poorly?  Why You Need To Design The Solution Before You Hire  Why Contractors Are NOT Employees How to Avoid Creating Unethical Circumstances  Allowing Perfectionism to Prevent Improvements Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready for even more content? Bite sized videos, lessons, tutorials? We can’t believe it’s taken us this long, but we finally have a TikTok account! If you are a business owner looking for marketing tips, Canva tips, Dubsado tips, client-based tips, and everything in between, we are sharing everything there. That’s just a side note, our episode today is all about the difference between working in your business and working on your business. We’ve gone through many different seasons together, in life and in business, and in our usual style, we’re going to be spilling all the beans for you today!  Cycles of Introspection Versus Invitation We went from a season of introspection into a season of inviting new things in. These seasons are so radically different that it almost feels like we have become different versions of ourselves. Change can be scary, but we’re super excited about it. Introspection is a season that’s about learning to relisten to yourself, becoming reengaged with your thoughts and your intuition and asking yourself questions about how you feel and where you are going. On the other side of this introspective cycle, for us there was a deep desire to add to our lives and fill them with new things. At the moment we’re inviting things in, but we probably wouldn’t have the capacity to do this if we hadn’t gone through our introspection stage; both stages are super important and wherever you are at, we’ll meet you there!  Our Top Reading Tips to Get the Most Out of Books We both went through a phase where we couldn’t get enough of podcasts and we were reading hardly anything at all, but then we decided we wanted to read more this year, and we’ve been knee-deep in books ever since! If you’re struggling to get back into reading, getting a Kindle Unlimited Membership gives you access to so many books, and you can just start off with the easy ones like we did to flex those reading muscles again. Once you’ve passed the early stages, you may want to learn tips to read faster so that you can take in more information. If you’re at that stage, we have a top speed reading tip to share with you today; read diagonally! Don’t worry, this sounded crazy to us at first too, but it really works! We’ve built up a pretty extensive library of business books.  Value in Different Perspectives Reading books has rubbed off on so many other areas of our lives; we’re finding new people to follow and making new connections. What we’re really trying to focus on now is not only reading books and making connections with people that validate the opinions that we already hold. We’re intentionally trying to absorb information that doesn’t quite align with what we’ve always believed to be true. For example, Emylee recently bought a book called REWORK which was written by the co-founders of BaseCamp, and even though she really doesn’t like using BaseCamp, she bought it so that she can expand her mind by reading about a new business perspective.  HIGHLIGHTS Cycles of Introspection Versus Invitation. [0:09:00]  Our Top Reading Tips to Get the Most Out of Books. [0:12:03]  Value in Different Perspectives. [0:22:12]  KEY TOPICS Introspection Learning vs. Doing Phases Books Speed Reading WE MENTIONED Co-op Boss Project Incubator   The Nugget Podcast  Rework  The Creative Template Shop on TikTok Boss Project on Amazon Emylee on Instagram Abagail on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you might be under the impression that the hosts get along just fine. You’re right! When there are just two people, conflict is a lot less complicated, and a lot easier to resolve. Around two weeks into having a bigger team, we noticed that everyone would look to us for the answers, never contesting our conclusions. Different perspectives, backgrounds and insights all help us to make better decisions as a company. Abagail and Emylee want to make it really clear that not only do they not want to make all the decisions, but they actually believe that would be a really bad idea! That’s where conflict is necessary for the business to grow and thrive. Our new policies regarding encouraging conflict here at Team Boss Project Ever heard of artificial harmony? That’s what happens when the owner throws out a bunch of ideas, and the employees act as an agreeable audience. The motivations are good, but the effect is that you never end up saying what you really want to say unless you are the owner. Emylee and Abigail are no longer looking for consensus, they don’t need everyone to agree and back their ideas, but rather to disagree and commit! So, how do you, as a leader, create an environment where there can be healthy conflict? Ask the question, and then shut up! This leaves the necessary room to hear everyone else’s thoughts and opinions on the matter. The most crucial rule to follow for healthy conflict. A decision is better than no decision! An action is better than perfect action. It’s getting the ball rolling that teaches you what you need to do next. Generally speaking, this way of doing things helps us to stop things before they develop in the wrong direction. Critiques Abagail and Emylee experienced in art school helped us to manage feedback in our work. Don’t get 90% into a project before you send it through for feedback! It’s not personal, it’s a way to help everyone not to waste time.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s never a good time to make radical changes and you can always find a reason not to do something. But we’ve learned from experience that there is so much to be gained from pursuing opportunities, even under adverse circumstances. One of the things that inhibit us from pursuing growth and opportunities is the feeling that we wouldn’t be able to cope with these new changes in a healthy and sustainable way. We often feel this because we compare ourselves to others. But the truth is that you can never know the full story of someone’s success. You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes or how their life really looks. One of the biggest things we’ve learned from building our business is the importance of a supportive team and designing a business that is flexible enough to accommodate you during the different seasons of your life. We discuss some of the difficult circumstances we’ve been in while building our business and how it motivated us to build a business that could adapt to our needs. We also share our advice and insights on how to change your mindset and start pursuing radical change. So make sure you tune in to hear how we’ve adapted to our circumstances and how we’re helping others do the same! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The things we hear all the time are either, “I’m doing all the right things but I don’t necessarily know what to focus on next. I don’t know which lever to pull next and I don’t know why I’m feeling so overwhelmed.” Or, “This is so fun and easy! How do I set up myself for success in the future? How do I maintain this and keep growing?” We find that everyone’s always trying to look ahead, yet what’s truly beneficial is understanding the phase that you’re currently in order to clock why things are going well, where they’re going wrong, and what you need to do to move into the next phase. What we forget is that pitfalls are inevitable and that, as things grow, there are going to be roadblocks, hesitations, and frustrations. We are all bound to feel stuck at some point or another. We want to assure you that this feeling is normal (and necessary) and that we can help you to get out of it! In this episode, we tackle the three phases we see every service-based business owner move through, fill you in on how we really feel about burnout, and share our greatest wish for every single service-based business owner out there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What kind of business are you dreaming of? Whatever that looks like, it is your choice! And you get to make that everyday. We’ve had a lot of people approach us asking for permission to pursue a life-first business, but the call is yours to make. Our lives are all so different and unique that we can’t prescribe the details of what a life-first business looks like for you, but we can offer you some hard-earned wisdom to guide you in creating a framework that works for you! We all have boundaries we need to put in place to fulfill the life-first structure to support you as you create the life that you want. It’s fully within your power to implement and enact a plan to achieve it, but you’ve got to make the call. While there’s never going to be a magic bell that tells you what to do, we’re here to help show you the way. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. To download the transcript of this episode head to: thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Starting a business is a huge undertaking. And sometimes when we’re in the midst of building a company and struggling with a particular problem, it can be tempting to simply give up and start over with a new business. But the amount of work it takes to get a business off the ground is far more overwhelming than making changes to your current business. It’s just that it usually doesn’t feel that way because you’re not in the thick of things.   In today’s episode, we’ll be tackling the topic ‘What would we do differently if we were starting over?’. Tuning in you’ll hear about some of the mistakes we’ve made, what precipitated them, and how we’ve helped clients avoid the same pitfalls. It may seem like the things that worked seven years ago would no longer be relevant today, but we’ve found that’s totally not the case. Many of the most important lessons we’ve learned are ones we often need to be reminded of to help us solve current problems. So this episode has been really helpful for us too! Tune in to hear our lessons on scaling up, honing in on your talents, why we love collaboration, and so much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We may be divided in how aware we currently feel in terms of how we’re spending our time, but one thing we can agree on is that we need to be mindful of it! So many mentors over the years have questioned how we’re utilizing our time and, for as many years, it wasn’t being used as effectively as it could be! As service-based business owners, many of us tend to wear too many hats, which prevents us from focusing on what we do best. We’ve personally been through a really unique season where we've been hiring a lot and we have more help than we’ve ever had! This has allowed for more time to rethink how we’re spending the time we do have, instead of simply filling it with the necessary tasks to keep charging on. Does that mean we’re working any less? Absolutely not. This is not a slow season by any means, but we have been able to dig into a time where we can be really intentional. In this episode, we discuss the importance of protecting your hours and being intentional with your time, the value of visioning, and the seven most common mistakes we see service-based business owners making. Tune in to find out what needs to shift in order for you to unlock future growth and move towards a life-first business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s something in the air at the moment; so many people are questioning themselves and their businesses, and there’s a whole lot of very valid reasons for this (we are in the midst of a pandemic and heading towards a potential World War, after all). A lot of service providers have, as a result of these feelings of uncertainty and overwhelm, considered pivoting their business by adding different streams of revenue, changing their offerings, and so on. For anyone who is entertaining alternative ideas, we understand the allure, but we want to bring you back to reality and share with you what you should be doing during these challenging times instead!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you are a service provider finding yourself in need of a little bit of a serotonin boost and you’re looking for a pep talk from your Biz Fairy Godmothers, this is the episode for you! We have some really valuable reframes for you; some shifts in thinking. We see you in ways that you perhaps don’t see yourself, and we want to share those insights with you. We’re going to share some really cool, kind, impactful things with you today, so prepare to be showered in words of support. It might make you feel uncomfortable and you may have a hard time accepting the compliments, but here’s the thing: it’s because we genuinely care! No one else is saying these things to you and it’s important to us that we pour back into you in the same way that you’ve poured into us over the years. We are ready for you to believe in yourself in the way that we believe in you. That means listening to the things we’re saying, truly taking them to heart, and allowing them to sink in and make an impact. Tune in to learn about the reframes that service providers need to hear right now and to find out what we see in you (it’s a lot!) so you can believe in yourself in new ways. Never fear, your Biz Fairy Godmothers are here! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many people ignore the things that can really move the needle in their businesses because they often seem deceptively simple. We want to help you understand these simple ‘levers’ and use them correctly, because we can guarantee that they will improve your business in more ways than one! In this episode, we let you guys in on the not-so-secret levers that will allow you to continue to prosper and create more profit in your business. Hitting ceilings of time and money are an inevitable part of running a business, but your ability to adjust the levers that talk about today is a superpower that you will always have.  Tuning in today, you’ll find out how to decide which of the two levers you need to pull next in order to increase profits or get more of your time back, how to start with a life-first mentality when shaping your offers and price, and the self-reflection questions you can ask yourself when you've hit an income and capacity ceiling, plus so much more!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we want to talk about what happens when you grow your own business only to wake up one day and realize that, although you’ve grown out of the ‘wearing all the hats’ phase and you’ve got all the right people and systems in place, everything still seems to be falling apart. You might still feel like you’re doing 75 million things and you have no idea how you got here or what you’re doing and you feel deeply ashamed that you don’t know how to fix it. We’ve met so many self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who are the CEOs of their businesses, yet they don’t really know what it means to fully sit in that seat, and part of the confusion lies in the fact that they are incredibly talented. We’re talking about people who have typically excelled in everything they’ve ever done! They’re so used to being the star and, suddenly, they feel like they’ve hit a ceiling. This moment of reckoning is inevitable, and it hits everyone at a different point. For some, it'll feel like an income ceiling and, for others, it might feel entirely time-related. For some of you, it might be a recognition that you need more help but you can’t afford it, or that you’re mismanaging the help you do have, have the wrong help, or you don’t know how to identify the help you need.  Essentially, at the root of all of this is, because you’re so smart, you’ve been able to effectively communicate enough of what you do to the outside world so that you can sell your service and expertise, package and deliver it, but you’re lacking the foundational business knowledge that it takes to ultimately scale your business! In this episode, we fill you in on the most important skillset for a CEO, the roadblocks that every industry expert consultant faces as their business grows, and what to do when you've hit a ceiling in your income or capacity, so make sure to tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The interesting thing about any mistake is that it’s not always detrimental when you do it at the beginning, but holding onto it can sometimes prevent you from future success! At a recent conference we spoke at, we were asked about some of the biggest mistakes we have made in our business; and one of the things we highlighted was structuring our business according to task-based activities, rather than bringing in a team of permanent employees with outcome-based deliverables.  It can be frustrating to hire a whole team of contractors and you still feel like you’re bearing the brunt of everything that keeps your business moving forward but, unfortunately, it’s also unavoidable! Until you make the move toward bringing employees on to share in your vision, this has to be the case. Sharing too much of that burden with your contractors can lead to burnout and inefficiency, especially as a woman-led business and, while we totally get that there are major problems with the ‘Rise and Grind’ culture, we believe it’s equally problematic not to do anything in your business. Unless you’re willing to drop some major capital at the risk of never seeing a return, you absolutely have to get involved. Stop comparing yourself to Jeff Bezos! You can’t compare your small business with the big guns in Silicon Valley because you just don’t have the same resources that they do. We encourage you to keep that in mind when you’re structuring your team and mapping out your own role. Creating outcomes for your employees is one of the most efficient ways to start this process. Not all metrics are quantifiable, which is why you have to be as clear about your expectations as you can. In today’s episode, we outline some of the small changes that can make all the difference and share some of the shifts we implemented in our own team in order to transfer ownership and delegate, so make sure not to miss it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something we feel is getting a little bit confused in the realm of being a service provider consultant, learning from other people, hiring contractors, having employees, and serving clients, is the question of how we serve said clients, how we learn, and how we get work done in our own business. The conversation around working one-on-one with people, using done-for-you services, and learning in different aspects by buying books, hiring a coach, or being in a group coaching program, all start to get a little muddy when we’re also service providers in that very business.  We want to clear this up and provide some perspectives and clarification on the buckets we see us providing, our clients providing, our clients hiring for, and really how things can be structured to have purpose within these different containers. Today, specifically, we’re talking about what the heck group coaching is and when it’s actually beneficial, versus one-on-one coaching and done-for-you services, both as a provider and the consumer. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you follow us on social media you may be aware that we have just announced our first virtual conference! While the conference will no doubt share some similarities with our online summits, we anticipate that previous attendees will be shocked by how incredibly different this experience truly is. One of the developments that we are most excited about is the fact the entire event will be live, giving us the scope to connect with attendees in real-time! We are also deeply aware that our participants are incredibly busy which is why we’re so proud that the entire conference will take place over the course of one day within four sessions!  We’re tremendously excited about the impact of this live event and the opportunity to foster a sense of community amongst industry experts, consultants, and CEOs! Head over to bossproject.com/conference to sign up! There will also be a special bonus day on March 30 for those who want even more. It comes at no extra cost, but you do need to apply! So once you’ve booked your conference ticket head over to bossproject.com/vip to apply for our special bonus day event! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the second hottest take of a conversation we’ve ever had publicly! We are so passionate about this topic, and we really want to pass on this valuable information to you because we deeply care about you and your team! When the mistakes that we are going to talk about today are made, we know that it’s coming from the best of places, but because the future of your company is at stake, and because we care about that, we really hope you’re going to listen to this episode!  The fact of the matter is that you are most likely drastically overpaying your staff. We so often see owners hardly taking a salary for themselves, but then paying their staff six figure salaries. We also see people hiring super cheap labor. There is so much wrong with both of these phenomenons, but the good news is that there is another option!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are going to be sharing some thoughts and some hot takes about hiring! There are so many people out there saying all sorts of things that make our insides squirm, and we don’t want you to waste your time and effort on strategies that definitely do not work. We also got sucked into the sexiness of the idea of hiring duplicates of ourselves, so we speak from firsthand experience when we tell you that this is a BIG mistake!  When people get to the point where they know they need to bring on someone else, it’s usually because of one of two main reasons; either that they need to hire for a very specific role for their company, or they’re burning the candle at both ends and therefore if they hire “another me” they’ll be able to get twice as much work done, but if you keep listening you’ll understand why you should never hire another you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a problem that we’re seeing in this space and it’s causing people to miss massive opportunities! You’re losing out on revenue and you’re losing out on tapping into familiar industry terms, and so much of this can be solved by simply re-labeling who you are to become well-known to the rest of the world. For years, small business owners, especially those in the creative space, have continued to label themselves as such. “I’m a small business owner”, “I run a small creative business”, “I’m a creative entrepreneur”, we’ve seen these terms run rampant.  But the thing that is missing right now in this space is that you are not utilizing terms that the rest of the world recognizes and already uses and, because of that, you’re missing out on business. If you have previously identified as a creative small business owner, especially those of you who are running a B2B service-based business helping other small businesses, we have an uplevel for you. We can change the game! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we first decided to take a workcation, there was no way of knowing just how beneficial it would be. We have always added in times to do planning sessions and pin down what we want, but what we have learned is that creating a dedicated time to make sure it happens is so, so important. The only way for our business to move forward in the past was for us to hop on the phone with one another, and brainstorm ideas. But as our roles have shifted, this hasn’t happened as often. That’s why we’ve carved out CEO time on our to-do list, to help us have the correct focus.  We’ve all spent so many years working for businesses that are not structured well, not managed well, and that took all the lessons we didn’t like and implemented them in the workplace. This is the extreme opposite of many of our efforts to create flexible environments that take into account all of our humanity. But what we’ve found is that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Not having boundaries or expectations doesn’t help anyone either! To us, knowing that we had the time to think and brainstorm without boundaries, but also adding boundaries to make the follow-through inevitable, was everything! It’s so important to add enough momentum to make sure that you achieve what you’re hoping to achieve. When you take incremental steps, it doesn’t feel like you’re eating the whole pie at once! Our main takeaways from the experience were that there’s a difference between the conversations that are had within leadership and team meetings, and within the room where it’s just you and your business partner. It’s so important that this happens periodically for the good of the business. That’s the high-level stuff that moves everything forward. If you’re not ahead of your people, they’re not going to know where to go.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve had a very special kick-off to 2022. Not only is our company expanding, but we are also making big shifts in our business and how we lead our teams. While hiring new team members has its challenges, it’s still been an incredibly exciting time. With our shift from contractors to full and part-time employees, we have had an unprecedented opportunity to intentionally build our team culture and empower our employees with a transfer of leadership to various departments!  Our growth as a company has also brought about a change in business needs, particularly when it comes to productivity and organizational systems. Tuning in you’ll learn about the new organizational system we’ve been working on and how it will elevate your offerings. If you’re a fan of what our previous offering Trello for Business brought to the industry, you’ll love what we have in store for you! To learn more about how we’ve been leveling up our leadership skills, as well as exclusive insights into our new offering, make sure you tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With all the conversations we’ve been having about learning, scaling, and unlocking new strategies for your business, people have started to worry about how they are going to find the time to add something else to their plate. You may really feel that learning something new will be beneficial to your business, but the thought of doing that when you’re already overwhelmed can be extremely daunting.  But the thing is, it’s mentally taxing to be a human in the world right now, and learning strategies that will help you better manage the hustle and grind that you’re on is one of the best ways to grow! If you’re feeling overwhelmed, this episode is for you, because we’re going to provide you with some mindset and business benchmarks to help you gain some clarity on what you should be focusing on right now!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is inspired by a 45-second TikTok we stumbled upon about what’s going on in the online business world. We specifically loved the phrase, “We’re at the end of the Girlboss era” because, honestly, we couldn’t agree more! Today, we talk about what the landscape of online business looked like five or six years ago, what it’s looking like in 2022, and why we think there is so much more access and opportunity than ever before. However, it is going to take a shift! We are in a new season, we are in a new world, and people have different expectations. Let's take it back in time and investigate what the Girlboss Era is, what started it, and why we think it’s on its way out! We take a look at the radical shift required to move forward in business and as a society, the realization required to shift your mindset, and where we really and truly hope the online business world isn’t heading! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

December 2021 may have been the busiest and most strategic December we’ve ever had on record! Although we only took three days off this month, which is a huge deviation from how we normally run things, we’re extremely excited about how all our planning and purpose in December has set us up for a great Q1 in 2022! While it was tough having such a busy December, it was all with very particular goals and intentions in mind.  So much of our decision-making came back to growing our organization and looking at new employees and the positions that need to be filled as we continue to grow and scale. We had a lot of hiring decisions in the works, which formed a big part of our top priorities in December, but they were all 100% worth it. Luckily, because of the way we set things up in December, Q1 of 2022 is set to be the most intentional Q1 we've ever had! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of our biggest pet peeves is watching people let their time escape from them. Time is our most valuable resource, yet it is the thing that we see people giving away freely all the time. In today’s episode, we are going to talk about the three biggest time wasters that really hold service providers back. It is possible to work less while earning more at the same time!  There’s a mindset amongst many business owners that if they’re not busy, they’re doing something wrong, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. There are always going to be moments where you’re feeling frazzled and overwhelmed, but that doesn’t have to be your reality all the time. If you listen to this episode and resonate with what we’re saying, go to bossproject.com/incubator to sign up for our How to Double Your Income Working Less than 20 Hours Per Week workshop; you won’t regret it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The opinions we share in this conversation might make you uncomfortable, and that’s okay! Today’s show addresses one of the patterns we’ve seen emerge among our clients: their goals are amazing, but the path they intend to take to get there keeps them playing small. We’ll brainstorm with you, regardless of how you intend to move forward, but we do have some hard-earned insights that suggest that staying focused on the skillset you have and knowing your value can lead you to a place where growth becomes potential. You CAN find the time and money freedom you’ve been dreaming of; it’s never too late to get back to your zone of genius, or to change, transition, and pivot to work on what you should be working on! We’re here to give you the tough-love talk you may need as a one-to-many model business owner. It’s so important to continually ask yourself what it is that you want out of what you’re doing. Once you’ve done that, you need to do the math! We can’t tell you what to believe, but your audit of what you’re already doing certainly can. We’ve made mistakes along the way, and we want to help you avoid the same ones we made, which is totally possible. You can carve out a way forward that leads to your growth rather than inhibiting it! Here’s how. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s start by saying it’s okay to be wherever you find yourself in your financial journey! This one’s for those of us who are working our faces off on the back end, and not seeing this translate to profits. Maybe you’ve already identified your first baby step to start working towards your goal. Today’s episode is about identifying your goals, and putting them into action. We’re here to equip you with the tools you need to put those steps into action with a long term goal in mind, from identifying what you want out of it, to learning what you need to learn to grow a healthy business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been hearing the term 'financial freedom’ a lot within our community within the past year. But what does that mean and how do we achieve it? Too many people are looking at financial freedom in the wrong way; it’s not something that you suddenly wake up with one morning, there are various milestones along the journey. In today’s episode we’re going to break down what these milestones could look like for you, and what you should avoid while seeking financial freedom. Boss Project is here to serve you, and a major part of our personal mission is to help you achieve financial freedom so that you can reach your big goals and thrive! We’re not here just to teach you how to make more money, we want to give you the financial education necessary to build the life you truly want! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new year is fast approaching, and with it comes excitement, planning, and a whole of strategizing! We want to take all the things that worked so well in 2021, and carry it over into 2022. One of the biggest changes we’ve experienced in the last 12 months, is taking on a host of new full-time employees and growing our team! Soon, our full-time employees will even outnumber our regular contractors! It’s been really exciting expanding our business family, and we’ve learned a lot in the process. To prepare for 2022 we’ve brain dumped all our anxieties and aspirations for the coming year onto paper, and blocked out our calendar accordingly. This is the biggest team we’ve ever worked with and we’re excited to take a far more structured approach to scheduling time-off, holidays, and blackout days. We’re taking everything we’ve integrated into our lives about how we run our business and are passing it on to the team. To learn more about our trajectory for 2022 and how we’ll be growing our business, tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A year is a long time, and you forget some things that happened throughout the year. We consistently overestimate what we can accomplish in a short period of time, and dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. A lot can happen in a year! We’re taking a walk down memory lane to discuss the things that have happened throughout the year! While we feel mostly like the same people, we’re coming from a different starting point at the end of 2021 than at the beginning. There’s some irony to the decisions we made this year. This year, we decided not to grow, but to maintain the business that we had. We needed a breather. Despite that being true, we grew topline revenue by nearly 20%. The lesson? We don’t give rest the credit it deserves! That period of rest was a lot more significant than we give it credit for and it’s prepared us for easily the busiest year we’ve ever had. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another profit report! We’re going back in time to talk about November 2021. We’ve been doing these profit reports for over two years, and we can’t believe how time has flown by! For those who are new to the profit report, in these episodes, we offer a breakdown of our strategies and decisions, as well as insights into how money moves around within a company like ours. It allows you to gain an informed perspective on what it looks like to grow a company of our size, and hear insider conversations about things like healthy profit margins and expenses. Today, we talk about our launch in October and how it has affected our November profits, including recurring revenue from people who made purchases in October. We unpack some of the exciting changes we’ve made, particularly when it comes to budgeting and reimagining how we’re going to continue to grow and scale. You’ll also hear about why a lot of this comes down to hiring and how we make decisions around that based on projections of client needs and outcomes. Tune in for a detailed breakdown of our profit report, insights into our goals for next year, and why we are so excited to grow! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on the Strategy Hour podcast, we discuss how to create benefits that will attract top talent while also allowing your company to thrive. Running your business can often put you in situations where you have to compromise, but that doesn’t mean those compromises have to be permanent. Once you reach the point where you can take on new staff, you can begin to ask yourself what benefits you can offer versus what you want to offer. It won’t happen overnight, but setting out goals that build towards your vision for your company can be incredibly motivating! Hiring new staff can come with a series of unanticipated costs outside of their salaries, like taxes and opening new 401K plans. While it may seem overwhelming at first, a little planning goes a long way. We’ve benefited greatly from having expert consultants advise us on how to take on new hires, from accountants to help us with cash flow, to HR’s advice on how to structure maternity leave and healthcare benefits. It’s been incredibly exciting entering this stage of our business, where we can grow our work community and set goals for how we can support our employees in every aspect of their lives! We fully believe that you are so much more than your job and your career, and we want to support all those elements from family, to friends, to health and alternative medicine.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have to get creative about how we manage human resources within a completely digital team that is just growing and growing! It’s been the wildest 6 months. You will go through seasons of your business where you are very sure about what you want and what you don’t want, but remember that you have the right to change your mind. What we wanted two years ago is not at all what we want right now, but we’re not mad about it. When you change your mind about something, it’s probably because you have learned more, have more confidence and more skills, and that is nothing to feel bad about! This episode is all about the mindset shift which led us to change something in our business that caused an unprecedented level of growth!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we have a very exciting episode with Emylee, Abagail, and Abagail’s partner, Jared Pumphrey, who joined the team earlier this year as Boss Project’s Marketing Manager! Join us as we dive into what Jared’s role entails, how it has impacted our business, and how he has no idea how we managed before we had someone dedicated to running the day-to-day operations. Tuning in, you’ll also find out how to set boundaries for a healthy marriage when going into business with your spouse, as well as what Jared and Abagail love about working together. Jared unpacks the importance of having an internal system for quality control and why, if you're the last person who did something to a document, you can't verify that it's perfect. Later, we reflect on how a team can thrive when they are allowed to play to their strengths, what that entails, and how you can go about helping them operate in their zone of genius. We cover a lot in this episode, from why we decided not to outsource our marketing to finding your strengths and the importance of customer experience, plus SO much more, so make sure to miss this insightful and informative discussion! Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram @bossproject if you have any questions. We would love to hear from you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we’re talking all things holiday and work and productivity and delegation and organizing and all of that good stuff! If you haven’t listened to any of our previous episodes about taking the full month of December off, we highly recommend that you go do that. But today’s episode is going to be a little bit different, because our business looks a little bit different now. We’re going through a different season in our business, so we aren’t taking the full month off like we have done in the past, we’re still going to make sure that we enjoy our holiday season!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Part 1 of our conversation with Megan involved a discussion around the difference between self-care and treating yourself (and what this means for you as a business owner) and how to really step into your identity as a person and figure out what fills you up. We ended the last episode by touching on the confidence realm; confidence allows us to do so many things in life and business.  Today, for part two of our conversation with Megan, we’re going to continue on this confidence theme and also get stuck into our very favorite ‘B’ word of all time; boundaries! Boundaries look different for everyone, and can be continuously redefined as you grow and change as a person. Nobody knows what’s going on in your head, and setting boundaries is a way of protecting your energy, your wellbeing, your personal safety, and so much more. Join us today as we spill all the beans on boundaries!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today, Megan Reed, is one of our new client success coaches inside the Incubator. She works alongside our clients to really uncover some of the mindset work that's necessary to take you to the next level. Her background in design makes her a really valuable player. Today we’re going to be talking about the beliefs that you have about yourselves, and some things you need to be working through.  We don’t often tackle the topic of mindset on this show, or with our clients, because that isn’t our field of expertise. So we decided to bring someone on who really knows what she’s talking about. The reason why we wanted to cover this topic is because of the responses that we received to a question we asked on our Incubator intake forms. “How do you like to treat yourselves?” was the question, and the answers basically ranged from, “I don’t know,” to “I don’t treat myself.”  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been working on something exciting for a really long time and today’s episode exists to introduce you to our newest offering, which includes taking on clients for our business incubator! Our business was working. We could have successfully continued with our existing plan. Instead, we made an intentional move, looked at what we wanted to do, saw that the mission was the same as when we started, and then asked ourselves how we could achieve even more of that! If you can focus less on what you want and more on the problem you are actively solving for your audience, the doors will open. Your business should take care of you, NOT drain you! We want you to know that where we are today is the result of having a full staff of people, an audience in the millions, and six whole years of hard work, which is why we are sharing some insight into our hiring process, the art of simmering, our desire to take on clients again, and so much more in our October profit report for 2021! Join us today!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we gain a really interesting perspective on the topic of branding from Shaunda Head, an Atlanta-based brand strategist and digital marketer who helps women align ALL THE THINGS in their brand so that their brand message can impact more powerfully! We chat about Shaunda’s experience of building her expertise in corporate institutions and the challenges of the transition between that world and going out on her own. Shaunda also shares the process she went through to uncover who she really is, rather than who she was when she was working for someone else. A lot of our clients are in the same position; you guys are highly skilled, you know your shit, and you can serve people in incredible ways, but figuring out how to do that outside of someone else’s umbrella can be what is holding you back. This episode will give you some amazing ideas on how to rebrand yourself so you can step into who you truly are, so make sure to join us today to learn more from the amazing Shaunda Head! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To niche or not to niche? That is the question. This week we’re diving into the hot topic of whether or not to niche, so get your pros and cons lists ready because we’re about to dive into all the details of this tricky decision! Whether you’re a service-based business owner or multi-passionate with a wide variety of offerings, this question can be very difficult to answer, especially since there are benefits and drawbacks to both choices.  We’ve seen plenty of businesses overcomplicate their offerings out of a desire to help the client. Typically folks get into business armed with an expert skill set that serves both them and their customers. But once they’ve spent some time working with their clients, they begin to increase their offerings because they recognize a growing number of services that their clients need to have addressed. The problem that usually arises from this is that it becomes difficult to create consistent processes because you’re constantly jumping from one thing to another, which creates mismanagement in the back end of your business. We’ve given this issue a lot of thought so tune in for our thoughts on how you can simplify your offerings while also ensuring that your business continues to flourish! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We recently brought in an amazing cohort of clients inside of the incubator. Throughout that process we’ve read hundreds of applications, and there are two sentences that we found as a recurring theme and desire within these applications which we really want to respond to. We’ve got a lot to say on this topic, and we feel very passionately about it, so get ready for the rant! People have this elusive idea that they want to earn a passive income. In other words, they want to earn money in their sleep.  There is a version of this that does exist, and we’ll happily share that with you, but passive income isn’t what you think it is. If you believe that if you’re not chasing passive income then you’re doing business wrong, you need to listen to this. The way passive income is framed in the online industry is toxic, and can cause you to miss out on so many great opportunities. We know that passive income sounds like a perfect scenario, but today you’ll hear why it’s really not all that cracked up to be! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a massive problem that’s affecting our entire audience right now, and we have some seriously strong feelings about it, which you’re going to hear all about in today’s episode. Do you guys remember that show called Celebrity Deathmatch? That’s what we’re doing today, but we’ve got “serving” and “marketing” in the ring. We are furious on behalf of our clients because of how they have been manipulated into wasting so much of their time and money.  Today, we’re going on record to say that the business education industry is rampant with marketing pros trying to teach other people to be marketing minions instead of actually teaching foundational business concepts that don’t change. Marketing is in our blood, so we get the desire to do this, but marketing is not the key to success. Hear us out.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we first began to consider that we may need personal assistants, we discovered that we had some unexpected, and somewhat complicated, reservations. While the extra help would certainly have been welcome, we had a tough time justifying the hire in our minds. Hiring an assistant brought up an unexpected amount of mind junk, from outdated notions around a woman’s role in the house to Emylee’s very personal experience of her mom and nana owning a cleaning business, and it just seemed impossible to align the hire with our values. Add to that the terrible depictions of personal assistants that you saw in movies like The Devil Wears Prada, where PAs were always repeatedly degraded by their bosses, and the idea of hiring a personal assistant could easily make you feel like a monster.  It took us months and years to finally process and overcome these limiting beliefs and ultimately make one of the best decisions of our careers! Not only was hiring a personal assistant much more affordable and manageable than we expected, but we hadn’t anticipated the amount of freedom, peace of mind, and brain space it would give us! No matter where you are in your career, hiring a personal assistant is likely a much more achievable goal than you realize. In this episode, we break down how we chose to get a personal assistant, the process we used to prioritize our needs and reflect on how our personal assistants impacted our lives. So let’s dive in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Put your socks on, pour a fresh cup of coffee and tune into this conversation with Parker Stevenson. If you’re a service provider who wants to make more and work less, today’s episode is for you! It’s not that we’re comparing one business model against the other, but rather, we’re considering an informed perspective on the 1:1 and 1:many approaches to business. Scaling as fast as you can is always preferable. But delivering the best service you can, rather than offering absolutely everything, is far more achievable within a 1:1 model than a 1:many. Producing a great experience is more important than having a marketing strategy, because there’s no more powerful tool than word of mouth and referral!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It has come to our attention that there seems to be a widely held belief that high-earning service providers already know exactly what they’re doing. The perception is that everything is running super smoothly and that they are acutely aware of exactly what they need to be doing at all times. That they are solely focused on their zone of genius and that they've made no changes to the backend of how they run things. This is most definitely not the case.  If you’re feeling a sense of inadequacy or frustration, you are not alone. We’ve noticed plenty of instances where service providers are landing great quality clients, and are providing stellar services, while also dealing with a tremendous amount of haphazardness behind the scenes. There’s also the added pressure of feeling like you need to protect your clients from the messy middle of your business because you want to seem polished and professional at all times. And while these service providers are doing a really good job of faking it, this way of doing things is not at all sustainable, especially when it comes to your health and mental health. As service providers, we often don’t fully comprehend what will happen as our businesses grow. There's an ever-growing pile of admin and clerical work, as well as marketing and content production, not to mention everything else your business relies on. But what if you could eliminate this problem by creating a system and eviscerating unnecessary work? That’s where we come in. Throughout our careers, we’ve gained tons of experience and insight into creating a system that works! So let’s get straight to it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re taking it back to September! It feels weird, but we’re going to recap all of the amazing, incredible things that we did in the month of September so that you guys can get a little peek behind the curtains and get to understand what goes on in our brains and why we do the things we do. September was only last month, but it feels like a lifetime ago because we have been moving fast and furiously at team Boss Project. We’re excited to dig into not just the numbers, but everything that has been going on behind the scenes. It doesn’t make sense to only talk about what happened, and not about how it affected revenue and profit, or to just talk about revenue and profit and not about what actually made it happen. We think it’s really important to talk about both, and there aren’t enough conversations going on about truly how much it costs to run a service-based business, so today we’re going to lift the veil! We’re going to try and answer every nosey question you’ve ever had about costs, and if we don’t cover what you want to hear, you can always DM us, we’re totally transparent about our business!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode comes with a bit of a trigger warning. We're both feeling a bit nervous about this one, which has never happened before. It's based on the conversations that we have privately with each other when we see peers, clients, and students making the wrong assumptions about the topic that we're going to talk about today. We decided that we're doing a disservice by only having those conversations privately. What lights us up is to impact others and to change their lives and to have small business owners be financially and soulfully fulfilled, and to do that we feel that we have to share our take on this. If this conversation doesn't apply to you, you can skip it. If you are already crushing it and your business is made up primarily of courses and digital products and you're thriving and meeting your financial goals, then this conversation isn't for you. However, if you started as a service-based business owner and have added on courses and digital products and you have struggled financially and stressed yourself out because of it, then this episode is most definitely for you!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Time is our most valuable resource, because it is so limited, and yet is the thing that we see people giving away freely all the time. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about three giant time wasters that are really holding service providers back from working less in their business. It is possible to work less, and it is possible to make more by working less! Feeling frazzled and disconnected are such common experiences that people have started to think this is normal, so they keep doing it. We want you to know that this doesn’t have to be your reality. When we accepted that there are going to be different seasons and phases and iterations of our business, we were able to let go of the pressure of finding perfect solutions to our problems, and find peace in the fact that things are constantly evolving and that’s okay!  If you feel like you don’t have enough time, we’ve got a training course that is just for you. We’re going to teach you how to double your income by working less than 20 hours a week. This is something we’ve perfected, so we are speaking from experience, and trust us when we say this is something you don’t want to miss! Go to bossproject.com/incubator to sign up.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whenever we hit a big milestone in business it can make us nostalgic for the earlier days of our career when we were just starting out. It can make us reflect on the type of advice we would give a younger version of ourselves, even if it’s just little nudges about how to shift your mindset or attention. This summer Emylee celebrated the 10th anniversary of owning her own LLC! This type of milestone has made Emylee look back at her younger self and consider the type of advice she would give to a young, baby Emylee, especially when it comes to mindset shifts. Another major milestone this year is the sixth birthday of Boss Project being in business! All of this has caused us to reflect on the major mindset shifts that we have experienced in business and how they have helped us.  The cool thing about mindset shifts is that it’s not just for folks who are starting out. It can have a drastic impact on anyone at any stage of business. We often think that these changes matter more if you’re just starting out, but we’ve seen it make a huge difference to a range of folks who were feeling stuck in their business at one point or another. Whether they had the clients but were utterly short on time, and couldn’t imagine how they would manage to double their income, or they were making good money, but were also so miserable that they were on the brink of giving it all up. That is why today, we’re taking a look at the top mindset shifts that are necessary for you to double your income in the next 12 months. Because we believe explosive growth is possible for anyone willing to adapt and institute these changes. And so often it starts with a mindset shift that centers on self-belief because you have to believe in yourself first before you're willing to convince anyone else of what you're doing. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We want to help you all to make room in your life for great connections and perfect alignment! If you need to be empowered and equipped to say no more frequently both professionally and personally, today’s episode is for you! We can’t wait to give you some actionable strategies and real life tips on how to create more opportunities to say yes to better things. Today’s guest, Rachel Dorsey, owner of RAD Virtual Support, works in management and support roles for small business owners all the way up to multi million dollar digital enterprises to help working professionals to maintain work life balance that actually works.  During today’s episode, we discuss how people pleasers are often hesitant to say no because they actually want to say yes, but are often physically incapable of adding a yes to the list. You’ll hear why Rachel considers agreeing to too much to be a mindset issue, and why she urges listeners not to take ‘no’ personally, but to understand that it points to a misalignment that the other person has identified before you. We touch on how childhood and human design impacts your relationship with opportunity and rejection, and Emylee and Abagail share a real life example of how a ‘no’ that was disappointing and awkward in the moment, turned out to be just the right thing. Be encouraged that your next better opportunity is just around the corner, and receive some epic tools on how to establish boundaries to make way for your best fit in life today.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we dive into the top missteps we see businesses making when they want to grow. Side effects may include: burnout, overwhelm, stress, shutting down your business, getting a full-time job that you hate, or not reaching the income goals that you say that you want to achieve. We’re here to interrupt that vicious cycle and get a fresh perspective on exactly what’s causing these troublesome symptoms in your business!  The difficult truth and the number one problem for so many business owners is that they have diverged from an alignment with their business and the skills they’ve spent years crafting and honing in on. And if they didn't stray so far from where they began, then they would reach their goals so much faster! If this sounds like you, don’t worry, you are not alone! Almost all the prospective business owners we’ve spoken to have a misguided notion of what it means to leave their jobs and start a business. More specifically, what pursuing a digital-based offering with a low ticket item and a membership structure truly entails. In our conversation, we get into the popularity of this approach, how online education doesn’t paint the full picture and how you should be changing your mindset to achieve the growth you want for your business. Make sure you tune in to hear it all and see the full picture! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is about friendships; how you make them, how you keep them, how you maintain them, how you can be a better friend, how you let go of old friendships. Every question that you have felt uncomfortable asking about how to make friends in the online space or in the real world space is going to be answered on today’s show. Today’s guest, Danielle Bayard Jackson, from BetterFemaleFriendships.com and host of the Friend Forward Podcast. She is on a mission to help women business owners create and maintain better friendships as adults. You’re going to want to listen to this episode multiple times because you’re going to get so many actionable steps to take. We’re excited for you, as well as ourselves because we’ve experienced the loneliness that comes from knowing a lot of people but not having deep connections with them. We hope that so many friendships are made because of this episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we want to talk to all of you amazingly talented, creative people, who miss doing the thing they actually started their business for. We know that so many of you are crushing it, you have no problem landing clients, you are super busy, yet you feel like you’ve moved away from the thing that you really love doing. We want to let you know that you can step out of that, you have so much potential to grow into that creative director seat. Often, CEO status feels not totally in alignment for a lot of service-based businesses. Not that you don’t want to run a company of high calibre, but you still want to be delivering on the service, and oftentimes being in the CEO seat means that you don’t get to do that anymore.  We’ve been there, we know how it feels to not feel connected to what you’re creating anymore, but what we’ve realized is that that is the most sacred space for a creative service provider to protect so we’re on a mission to make sure that you all know how to protect it!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast! This week we get together with the multi-talented Tracy Litt: a mindset coach, spiritual advisor, rapid transformational hypnotherapist, best-selling author, and TEDx speaker. She is the founder of The Litt Factor, a company that supports high-achieving female leaders and entrepreneurs to understand and leverage their personal power. In our conversation, we delve into the life-changing effects of leaning into ease and finding calm. We unpack how the spiritual elements of your humanity impact not only our thoughts but also your potential business growth. While the format may be a little different from our typical show, we encourage listeners to take it as an opportunity to relax and lean in! Tuning in, you’ll be exposed to tangible takeaways for you to focus on getting more in touch with who you are and making life just a little bit calmer. We also discuss the transformational power of painful events in life, what it means to allow yourself to connect to your higher self, and how it can transform your life and your business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to join us on a journey back in time? We’re taking you back about 40 days to talk about our August numbers. We did so many things in August. It was a whirlwind of a summer! In today’s episode, we’re going to give you the scoop of what’s happening in our business in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you get “comparisonitis,” because there’s nothing worse than that. We approach these profit reports from a strategy perspective and what works for us, and we share achievable percentages which will allow you to look at your own business and decide what does and doesn’t make sense for you.  We started doing profit reports almost two years ago, and these involve us talking about profits and percentages and our goal of achieving a certain profit for our business. If you go do a binge listen of all of the profit reports we’ve done so far you’ll get some great insights into our business and our brains. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we have Gwen Lane, who has been through quite the evolution. She was a digital marketer turned lifestyle blogger and is now the founder of a Seven-Figure Influencer Program. She helps content creators and influences monetize through premium partnerships and digital offers. She has worked with crazy brands over the years, and she's also sold her business. Gwen breaks down two strategies: one where she sold her business that she started as a side hustle blog and what it means to be an influencer, what it requires to be in that space, and more. You're going to learn so much from Gwen.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re talking about what it is like to start to view your business through a new lens, specifically the new lens that we’ve been looking at our business through; the hybrid. What is a hybrid business model and how does it infiltrate into all the areas of our business that we’re running? Our hybrid thought process is something that has shifted how we view our business, from looking at each piece separately to understanding it as a coherent whole. A lot of this new thinking centers around our approach to hiring people and managing their roles, as well as our own roles, in our business. As you guys know, when we learn or uncover something we like to immediately turn around and workshop it here on the podcast because it helps us wrap our brains around it. We are by no means at the point where we have a complete understanding of what our hybrid business model means, we’re still at the early stages of discovery. It’s important for you to have context so you need to hear a bit of the background and how a late-night moment allowed us to open our eyes to the value of a hybrid model. So, join us on the journey!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another action-packed episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Our guest today is Meg Clark, the owner and founder of Clapping Dog Media, where she is the master of growing organic traffic. Using a combination of data, proven techniques, and years of experience, she attracts web visitors that not only stick around, but turn into paying customers. Simply put, she connects the dots of data to get your business found! During this conversation, we pick her brain about structuring your content to work for YOU and actually make you money! Get your notebook out because, today, Meg shares plenty of actionable strategies to help you do just that. Listeners will learn powerful SEO hacks to make your content worthwhile and convert to actual dollar bills, the secret to making Google happy even after changing your niche or what your business offers, and the most surprising thing we learned about traffic and what we're doing about it. We can’t wait to see how her strategies help to transform your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week’s episode, we take a look at the role of the integrator in online businesses. We discuss how the role has come about, what exactly it entails, and how hiring the wrong integrator places your business in jeopardy. While the role has gained significant traction in the last few years as a necessary step for any expanding online business, there are also some serious pitfalls that need to be considered!  When considering whether you should hire an integrator it’s important to ask yourself two key questions: First, identify what you are hoping to gain from your new hire. Do you perhaps feel like it will free up your time? Second, ask yourself whether there are other, more effective ways to get those benefits. Perhaps you could free up your time by delegating more work and automating systems that you are doing from scratch unnecessarily? Instead of hiring an integrator, this could be an opportunity to optimize your operations and give your staff the opportunity to take a more active role in your business! If you've been considering getting an integrator and are looking to maximize your time while also scaling your business then this episode is for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve been dipping your toe into the ad space lately, you would have been hearing that a lot has changed. Although people say that every year and the changes are usually not so significant, this year is different; because of some really big Apple changes, the game kind of did change, and we now have to think about a whole lot of new things when it comes to paid advertising. In this episode, we are joined by Tony Rulli, co-founder of the digital marketing agency, Intentional Spark. We had Tony on the show once before, during the peak of the pandemic (Episode 414 for anyone who wants to go back and listen)!  Today, Tony is going to be going over what those changes actually mean for marketers and advertisers and he’s going to share his best recommendations for how to not necessarily combat those changes (because you can’t really) but how to still get the information that you need to sell your product or service. We also have a TV segment near the end of this episode, where we’re going to be discussing some reality TV shows, and our hot takes!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we want to talk about what it takes to build a sustainable business. One that is focused on making income for the long term, and some of the projects that we are focused on internally that we think are just a little bit different to what we see other online business owners spending their time and energy on. To continue with our analogy from last time where we talked about your “Tinder date", we’re now going to segue into "How to make the relationship a bit more official.  But keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be forever. You’re not necessarily married to everything you put out into the world, but there is some commitment required when you start to think about how you build a business that creates sustainable, consistent cash flow. So if you want to hear about our helpful hints and top tips for creating that amazing content your business needs, let's get into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we are joined by our good friends from Dubsado, co-founder Becca Berg, and Sam Gioia from their product department. Most of our listeners are well aware that we are big fans of Dubsado and how they help businesses thrive by taking away the busywork. Dubsado is a fantastic platform, especially for small businesses! They have created an all-in-one system that helps you stay in motion, build relationships, schedule appointments, and create workflows to streamline your projects from start to finish. In this episode, we chat with Becca and Sam about the many new features that Dubsado has in store for its users. We hear about how they’re finding innovative ways to interrogate and test the usability of their platform, and the pressure and sense of overwhelm that comes with a desire to make your software, service, and product perfect before releasing it to the public. As a response to this challenge, we examine how you can break that intimidating perfection down into tangible goals and steps, allowing you to accurately view the progress you’re making on the elements you want to improve for your clients, students, or anyone else you may be working with.  We cover a host of concepts in this episode that are relevant to anyone, not just software companies, making this an excellent listen for anyone interested in improving products and services for their clients! Dubsado has an ethos of service, which resonates strongly with Abagail and Emylee as ex-service-based owners. At our core, we are both driven by how to best serve our clients and customers, but this episode offers some excellent ideas that can be implemented in any business and is also an exciting behind-the-scenes look at Dubsado’s new features that they’ll be rolling out soon. Be sure to tune in to this information-packed episode on all things development, customer service, and so much more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show, notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you tired of hearing our voices yet? We hope not because guess what just launched? Another freaking podcast! More words for your ear boxes in our voices. It's been so exciting to watch people’s reactions when they hear this is a thing. They'll say that they’ve been listening to the show for years, but then the questions start rolling in about the new show, “Where is it?” or, “I can’t find it,” or “How do I get access?” So, we are here, on our current podcast, to tell you about our new podcast that’s just launched, and we want to talk to you about how you can get access and what’s all involved because this is big news folks. We will talk about some high-level deets and what you can do to get inside.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is Kira La Forgia, someone who actually enjoys 1099s, W2s, FMLA, and FLSA; you know, all that human resources stuff that usually goes right over your head! Her operations consulting company, Paradigm Consulting, provides resources to online-based business owners that put people operations at the center of the organizational structure. Kira knows how to project, streamline, and scale businesses, working with leaders in their fields to blend their strengths, passions, and experiences into their unique company culture and develop a robust hiring and growth strategy, as well as providing you with the people you need to move your business forward! In this episode, we talk about what that looks like at different stages and Kira shares her top hiring tips for growing small businesses. Abagail and Emylee actually hired Kira as a consultant for their own company as they were phasing into growth and hiring employees, which is why we invited her on the show to share her take on small businesses, or businesses who are hiring contractors or virtual assistants, even for the first time. Kira shares some of the things you can set up to better your experience with contractors, the do’s and don’ts when it comes to contractors versus employees, everything you need to know about your employee handbook, and how you can make the onboarding process and the associated learning curves and mindset shifts around hiring a whole lot easier! We also touch on HR basics for small teams looking to hire contractors and employees, some of the mindset shifts you need to make when it comes to your team members, plus a new way of looking at org charts and what you need to do differently. We all want a scalable business model with no limit on revenue, which is why Kira’s insights are so valuable. Make sure not to miss this incredible and informative conversation, packed full of practical advice that you can implement today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are back here with another fan favorite: profit reports! Let's talk about all the things we did in July and how much money our products made. We love the profit reports because they are such a great opportunity to break down what’s been successful in our business. They also give us a chance to reflect on the things we did, the things we worked on, what we would do differently, and how it would ultimately affect the bottom line because that’s what this is all about. It's not revenue or how much income we generated; it’s about the profit we make in our business. For a while now, Abagail has been talking about using percentages to divide up your profits, and recently, she had a question about a line item. So, she asked our bookkeeping company what some of their recommendations are. They work with hundreds of online businesses in the space we are in, and they have an understanding of the breakdown of things. What made her so happy is that the things we have been working so hard on are the top amounts we should be searching for. This isn’t arbitrary and doesn’t just apply to our business; it’s applicable across the board! And we take a lot of pride in setting our business up in this way. That is also why we share these as percentages because the amount can throw people off if their businesses are not in the same arena or do not have the same goals. But there are percentages that literal professionals recommend businesses are at in terms of profit, or team, or education, or advertising. So, knowing when you’re in that ballpark is really, really reassuring as you continue to make a decision.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ready to grow your audience and grow your revenue at the same time, but don't know how? Well, this is the episode for you! Today on the show, we welcome Courtney Foster-Donahue, an Atlanta-based four-time entrepreneur and business strategist. Courtney founded and runs a multimillion-dollar company where she has worked with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs across the world. Through her acclaimed programs, Pocket Products™, The Course Course, and Launchpad, she helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses through digital courses, digital products, and digital marketing; which is exactly what we are chatting about today! We pick Courtney’s awesome marketing brain as she shares her tips for innovating while simultaneously keeping things simple and provides a peek behind the curtain of what is working for her right now. In this episode, we talk Pocket Products™, the revolutionary and inexpensive lead generation method that is perfect for service-based business owners like yourself to incorporate into your income revenue stream so that you can have another way of making money, add value to your audience, grow your list, get paid to grow that list, and serve up intense, amazing value! We discuss the number one way to grow your list through low-priced, high-value digital products, how to get paid and grow a list of customers rather than subscribers, and how to use the W.A.N.D. Method to figure out exactly what your Pocket Products™ should be. If you haven’t met Courtney yet, you’re in for a real treat! So, tune in, get out your notebook, and grab a fresh cup of coffee, because we’re pretty sure you’ll be ready to hit the ground running after this episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are here for part 2 of our story. First of all, if you haven’t listened to part 1, it’s literally the episode before this one. We did back–to–back with our voices and no guests. This is a two-parter, so if you haven’t listened to the first one, we highly recommend that you pause and go back to that one before carrying on with this episode. So, you are here and ready for part 2. We want to start this episode with a little preface, some boundaries, and we want to share the weirdness of being vulnerable online and in the internet space. These are deeply personal parts of our stories, and we are going to dive in and share a lot with you today. There is a good chunk of you who have been around for a really long time, and you will have heard bits and pieces of our story. But there is an even bigger chunk of you who have no idea what happened for us in 2016, a really big year for us in terms of pivoting personally and within our business. It literally changed every aspect of our lives and shaped the way we do business, and that’s what we will talk about today. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s show, we wanted to take you back in time a little bit and talk about the beginning stages of our business. We so often get asked, ‘How did this all start and why does it exist in the way it does today?” We think there are some incredible takeaways from the early part of our journey that we don’t often talk about but which have shaped the mission and vision of our business as we have continued to grow and make an impact in the world of online business. It has been interesting uncovering some of our story through the work that we have been doing with Rachel’s coaching program in which we are currently enrolled.  We have struggled to frame our story because it breaks the mold of how origin stories are usually told, in the sense that there are two of us, not one. Often we have felt that sharing our feelings and thinking out loud on this podcast has helped us find clarity, so we wanted to use this episode to tell our story! We hope that if you had some things holding you back from telling your own story that this episode might help you step outside your comfort zone and share a little more about yourself. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have the best thing since sliced bread to share with you. Big, big, big news. We are beyond excited. For the first time ever (note the sarcasm), we are giving more value to our members and our students because we love you and are obsessed with your success. It should come as no surprise to anyone that we just want to continue to see you improve your results. We are constantly looking at our programs and our offers to identify how we can help you be more successful, how we can arm you with the tools, strategies, and systems to be the most effective you can be. And we have been taking a good, long, hard look at everything we have done inside The Creative Template Shop, and we love it. It's not changing. All of that is staying AND it's growing and becoming even better!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While it doesn't take much talent to have a creative hobby, it takes skill, practice, and, most importantly, systems to monetize your creative passion and turn it into a career. By working with creatives, today’s guest is able to use his skill in law and tax while also vicariously working in the creative industry through all of you amazing ‘creativepreneurs’. Braden Drake is your gay best friend who also happens to be an attorney and tax pro, but aren't talking about the boring (but necessary) legal stuff today! For that, you need to head over to Braden’s podcast, Unf*ck Your Biz. Today, we are talking creating systems, standard operating procedures, and processes that work for the way YOU want to work in your business! This is a roundtable-style discussion about how our individual personalities impact the way we organize our to-dos and develop our SOPs, as well as how you can create systems that will actually benefit your business rather than wasting your valuable time as CEO. We also touch on the Profit First methodology and how it ties into getting “your legal and tax shit legit,” as Braden says. Tuning in, you’ll learn about the three things you need to consider when creating standard operating procedures for your business, how to create processes that work for your personality type, and the system Braden suggests to stay legal and compliant, plus a whole lot more! Make sure not to miss this informal and informative conversation full of practical tips with your new best friend, Braden Drake. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While we can’t tell you what this episode is going to look like, we can tell you where we are at. Being an entrepreneur is hard. It presents challenges that you don’t anticipate. Things pop up that you never imagined dealing with and you are pushed to grow as a person as you continue to grow your business. We wish we could say that it was always easy or that we always know what to do, but we don’t. The idea for this episode started when Emylee inboxed Jessica Eley and their conversation led to a lot of tears.  We want to preface this conversation by saying there are a handful of conversations that we have had like this where we are truly in the weeds and workshopping things as we go. We will probably get clarity just by talking it out with you guys and we love that we have the space to do that. It is not going to be an episode that ends with a resounding conclusion or strategy. We want to talk about the challenges that come with growth and clear out some of the junk in our brains in the hope that you won’t feel as alone if you were thinking some of the same things. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we have Pri. She’s an award-winning SEO strategist, Google Analytics expert, and Founder of Brilliantly Visible. Pri is based in London, and her work is frequently shared as an example of best practices in action at industry events in the UK. With her signature PROPS method, Pri helps people to build out datasets and create simple, automated metric dashboards that help them answer some of the most important questions they have in their business: what are my results, and how am I getting them? Those are two really helpful things to be mindful of in your business when you are growing from a data place, an analytically-driven place, but also in a place that’s in alignment with how you want to run your business and the decisions that you want to be making. If you have been avoiding looking at your data to see if you are actually getting the results you want, or if you are feeling overwhelmed about how to make decisions based on the results you are getting, this is the show for you! You will walk away with so many tips on how to make smart, intentional decisions in your business.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s official, we’re here for another profit report and it is June 2021! Well, technically it is no longer June but we are just backing up and talking about June, okay? Give us a second to get our accounting together so we can properly tell you about the month! We share these profit reports to give you an inside peek behind the curtain at the thinking, the processes, the strategies, and the decisions made in our business. We know you guys are nosey. We are nosey. We would love to hear more episodes like this from even more people but this is an opportunity for us to share with you the reasoning behind some of the choices that were made in our company, some strategies that you can implement in yours, based on what we learned and what we did, and it is just honestly a place for us to recap June with you guys! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we say that today’s episode is going to rock your world, we’re not even joking! If you have a client-based business and use Dusado, maybe you have wanted to set up workflows, but been so overwhelmed that you haven’t started, then stop what you're doing and listen to this show with a notebook because Krystal Clark literally breaks every step down! From lead capture to onboarding to delivering to offboarding, she leaves no stone unturned. Krystal even goes so far as to give us five hacks on how she’s using Dubsado differently than what we have heard before!  Krystal's creative brain takes something that already exists in Dusado and then reworks it to be custom for her clients and you guys. If you do not have Dubsado yet, you can get 50% off for the first year by going to the link at the end of the page. It will rock your world when it comes to infusing beautiful brand and designing the workflow process. A lot of what Krystal talks about, we either have a template that will make it simpler or she gave us new ideas for templates that you best believe are coming out. Please share the workflow that you’re going to get set up because you were inspired by this episode, tag us, and then be sure to also tag Krystal on Instagram.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is officially Christmas in July here at Boss Project! In case you haven’t heard, we are in the midst of our wildly popular 5 Days to Launch Challenge, which has helped over 10,000 business owners get their products, offers, and big dream ideas out into the world. If you are listening to this and you haven’t signed up yet, head on over to 5daystolaunchchallenge.com to sign up for this completely free program RIGHT NOW! Diving into today’s episode, we share the seven things that you need to know and think about in order to take full advantage of this challenge. We know that any time and energy you give us this week is precious, which is why we want to help you make the most of it. This program is specifically designed to move you and your business forward by identifying your most viable offer, packaging and selling it, and creating a wow experience for your customers, as well as walking you through your marketing game plan and, of course, the launch itself. In this episode, we cover how selfishness is the thing that will keep you motivated, why you need a Tinder level offer right now, and the best way to use people in order to land more dreamy clients, plus a whole lot more! Tune in to find out everything you need to know to fully benefit from this powerful opportunity to get yourself out there and get started today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Parker Stevenson is a great friend of ours and someone we love and respect a lot! He has done so much for us and our business in the years that we have been working together with Parker handling all of our bookkeeping. He has already been on the podcast a bunch of times and today he is back to talk about the all-important topic of launching! We get into cash-flowing a launch, how to know when you are ready or not ready, questions and preparation and how to pay yourself when it's all done. So basically we cover all the things you might be thinking about and what better person to ask than a bookkeeper. Parker is all about helping his clients remain profitable and this conversation will get you into a great headspace for possible launches in the future. We offer tons of free resources in the second half of the show so be sure to stick around for those and Parker gives the inside scoop on many business and how he has seen launches evolve. In his work, he has helped countless small businesses that apply to so much of our audience. So for all that and a whole more on getting your next launch off the ground and into the air, join us as we talk strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been a while since we’ve done a Boss Talk Strategy Hour Edition of the podcast. Usually, we bring on a guest but, today, it’s just us, and we’re discussing how finite thinking might be boxing you in. Simon Sinek famously tells the story of when Blockbuster’s board of directors viewed Netflix’s subscription model in the early 2000s. The CEO of Blockbuster said, “We must change our subscription model to compete, as streaming services are guaranteed to increase.” He was rejected by the board because Blockbuster earned 12 percent of its annual revenue from late fees and, well, you know the rest of the story. Blockbuster is no more and Netflix is the dominant force in the market. Why did Blockbuster turn down explosive growth and the chance to remain relevant for just 12 percent of their revenue? Well, by focusing on short-term, fixed goals, they inhibited their growth because they were blind to their long-term vision. Making decisions based on what is working for you right now isn’t the best strategy if you want to continue to innovate and scale your business. While it may seem scary, embracing an infinite mindset and basing your decisions on where you want to be is the key to success in an ever-changing world. In this episode, we share some of the surprising influencers in your business that could be distracting you from making CEO decisions, how to execute based on where you want to be versus where you are today, and when to shift from finite thinking to future-focused thinking. We also highlight the importance of trusting your intuition, not letting your goals hold you back, and taking your future into your own hands, so make sure to tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we have Courtney Chaal. She is a copywriter turned business coach obsessed with making complex concepts (like business models and sales copy) simple and tangible to help regular people achieve big results. She is a big believer in the power of offering a signature service as the best way to start making a full-time income online. And services are the theme for today’s episode. If you have ever thought about offering something you kind of, sort of, maybe know how to do to some people you kind of, maybe, sort of like, then this episode is going to be a really good framework for how to get started. We get into Courtney’s first clients, how she niched down to identify her value proposition, and how you can do the same thing. Courtney shares tips she would give new service providers after they have just landed their first client, and advice on what to do next. We also talk about something we’ve never mentioned on the podcast before: the dad bod level of business, so if you want to find out what that’s all about, make sure you stay tuned.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the things that we see creative entrepreneurs doing consistently is assuming that they know what their potential client or customer thinks about the value of what they offer. These kinds of assumptions ultimately leave you with a very messy blueprint for overcoming your own limiting beliefs and appropriately pricing your digital products and services. Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast, we want to address what really makes up the value of what you offer and how your potential clients or customers see what you offer because, believe it or not, they are not one and the same thing! How can we provide the utmost value, but also, who is deciding what that value is? Whose responsibility it is to see X results or receive X benefit? As creators, we put so much pressure on ourselves and tie our identity and self-worth into the results that our clients and customers are getting. We also equate our feelings of validation with whether or not we believe that an offering is any good. This is certainly a big unlearning that both Abagail and Emylee have had to undertake over the past few years! Tune in as we break down what really goes into pricing and packaging, how pricing correlates with value, and where your clients actually find the most value. We also uncover the main thing you are missing when packaging your offers, specifically when it comes to digital goods and services as opposed to tangible products, and the unexpected way that your clients get exactly what they want. If you struggle with deciding on your big-ticket items, then this is the episode for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we are joined by Alisha Cohen, Founder and Creative Director of LISH Creative. For the last five years, the company has produced photo and video content for some of the world’s largest brands, including Dunkin’, Nickelodeon, Burt’s Bees, Nestlé, Microsoft, and Cannon, among others. In 2020, Alisha launched her signature photography course, Slay the Flatlay, and currently shares photo tips and tricks with her Instagram and her TikTok audience, which has grown to nearly 500,000 followers! That is what we are talking about today; we are making this episode all about TikTok! It’s one of those totally mysterious social media platforms to us, and we love to hear the perspectives of other creatives. In today’s episode, Alisha shares so many amazing tips on how she thinks about TikTok, what made her sign up, even though she was a year “late” to the fad, how she has made it work for her business and, most importantly, how much money it has made her in this year alone. If you have ever considered using TikTok or Instagram Reels in your marketing strategy, this is the episode for you! Tuning in, you’ll learn some actionable and tangible ways that you can start thinking about these platforms and how to use them in order to actually make money, so make sure not to miss this informative and practical guide to help you make TikTok work for your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our 550th episode! We are moving into a season of growth and, with that, there are some big things that we have had to start doing and thinking about, both when it comes to staffing, projects, and programs and how we want to set our business up for success in the long term. May was a month of new faces as we brought our social media in-house, which necessitated hiring for a number of new and important roles. This has been an interesting lesson for Abagail and Emylee in finding a happy balance between delegating and ensuring their vision is communicated, resulting in new routines, rhythms, and collaborative efforts.  In today’s episode, we share not only the five new hires we made and how we're growing, but also our product performance and how our expenses impacted our profit, plus SO many sneak peeks that it's going to ABSOLUTELY BLOW YOUR MIND! Make sure not to miss this jam-packed Profit Report for May 2021! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, please join us in welcoming Megan Hale. Megan is a business strategist and money mentor for freedom-driven entrepreneurs who are ready to step into #feelgoodmoney and create sustainable, aligned business growth. With a special emphasis on empowering women-identifying entrepreneurs into their next level of growth, she regularly podcasts on the intersections of business, money, psychology, and leadership with a focus on leveraging entrepreneurship to build a more equitable world. And speaking of making the world a better place, this episode is all about giving back! Listen in as Megan outlines how to build giving into your future, and not only how you can integrate it into your business but how to do it sustainably too. During the course of this conversation, you’ll find out how you can grow your business through giving back, if that is in alignment with your business goals, of course. Megan breaks down what a sustainable percentage is, how you can logistically set that up within your finances, and how to find causes to give to, as well as her suggestions for some important questions to ask yourself along the way. For everything you’ve ever wanted to know about having an even bigger impact within your business and giving back, make sure not to miss this thoughtful and inspiring episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are really excited to chat today because we are sure some of you have had this situation pop up in your lives, you maybe have already dealt with this pre-pandemic, and we have a handful of small business owner friends in the same situation too. Emylee has had a few people ask if they can pick her brain about the fact that their partner realized last year that their work environments were more toxic than they were willing to put up with or the benefits aren’t worth it, and that their partners’ small business is where it is at. So, people are wondering what they need to do to step up their business so their partner can leave their job. We love this question because it feels like a big scary goal for a lot of people, but if it is not voiced by both people in the relationship, it does not get worked on as much. So, Emylee said to Abby that she wants to talk about how Abby’s husband managed to leave his job two years before COVID. So, what kinds of things did they do leading up to that, and now that they are in phase two of having him home, how does it look different? If you are a business owner and this suggestion has been brought to you by your partner, what guidance can we give you, in your business?   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Shunta Gray, an incredible soul who helps women live lives with intention. Through her company, Best Today, Shunta equips women with resources to be both proactive and intentional with their time. Shunta begins with time because it is the container that holds our days in our lives. She also offers a Best Today Guide, which is a 14-week undated guide that helps women plan their days with intention through her signature process, The Right Now Routine, which is what we are talking about today — how to create realistic routines that last.We are super excited to break down this conversation for you today, while Abby shares her journey of going through the program and how it deeply impacted her life, and the examples of how she has used it. Then Emylee shares about the program and why she has avoided going through it because of her misconceptions about routine and what it might mean for her in her day. Shunta does a really amazing job breaking down those hesitations and how routines can still work for creatives, for neurodivergents, and for people who don’t want a lot of structure in their day. We know you will get a lot of great ideas from this episode, so stick to the very end to find out more about all of Shunta’s amazing resources that you can dive into today to learn how to create a routine that’s perfect for you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, we just wrapped up the recording for our most popular webinar ever, Day Job to Dream Job. The discussion sparked some further conversations between us and some of our students about the whole ‘you can earn a full-time income without putting in full-time hours.’ We have the belief that you can do this from day one, and that it doesn't have to just be a financial milestone you reward yourself with. But the time and space freedom you get when you work for yourself looks different when you're just getting started versus when you are two years in, six years in, and even further in than that. So, today, we want to break down what we mean by that and dive into what we truly think is needed for the brain to rewire that thought process. We also give a sneak peek of what it looks like when you chase after free time, and how you choose to fill that free time. Because there are some of us who simply fill the free time we work so hard for with just more work! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Melanie Fountain. She is a Pinterest coach and strategist. She started her business in January 2019 as a virtual assistant and quickly found a passion and talent in growing her clients’ businesses through Pinterest marketing. We are going to help you learn how to do that today! If you are creating content in any shape or form then you need to know what is working for Pinterest in 2021.  We are doing an update for all the best Pinterest strategies that you can manage in your content, so you can create new routines while you are creating that amazing content. We talk about all the new stuff including video pins and story pins, how to grow your followers on Pinterest, and why that might start to matter now when it hasn't over the last couple of years. Our conversation also covers everything else that you can do to make sure that you are taking advantage of the amazing platform that is Pinterest! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you have been listening to us for a minute, you will have heard us alluding to the fact that we are headed toward a growth phase of our business and our lives. All of the things! We were having a conversation the other day about why we are ready for this now versus when we weren't, what's different, and what we think we need to shift in order to do it. One of the things that came up is that we realized that we had perfected delegating tasks in our business that stabilize it, make it do the thing that it's meant to be doing, and not let it slip back and fall. On the flip side, what we haven't done and what we don't know how to do yet is delegate, hire for, plan and help other people grow the business. So, we talked about this the other day, when just a couple of years ago, if one of us was out of the office, there would be a direct impact on our sales because there would be less posting on social and less content creation, which means we would have to plan and account for that. We grew out of that phase, so now one of us can head off for a week, and it does not impact our sales at all! This is fantastic, but the next phase for us is about more than just being able to go on vacation and see the business grow; it's about not having to be one of the two brains that contribute to the growth. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are joined by the wonderful and inspiring Kathleen Cutler! Kathleen has worked behind the scenes on multiple million-dollar online stores with her main area of focus being jewelers. She has coached over a hundred different jewelers to help them achieve their business goals and get their products selling online, but Kathleen’s expertise extends so much further than just jewelry! She wants to help everyone selling products or even services online to extend the experience of the customer and drive sales through the type of connections that you would usually associate with a physical retail space.  Along with all her incredible business skills, Kathleen is also an awesome speaker who will be joining us at our upcoming Product Powerhouse Summit! Make sure to go get your free ticket immediately! She will be one of many great speakers talking about the world of online product sales and marketing and getting your store busy and making that money! So without further ado, let’s get into today’s strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another Profit Report episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today, we’re talking about April 2021, and, needless to say, some money got spent, some money got made. We didn’t launch anything new in April, so this report makes a direct correlation with the fact that we have tried to build a profitable and sustainable business that brings in income, regardless of whether or not we are launching something new every month. We were still, however, working on some big projects, so we were certainly knee-deep behind the scenes! Sometimes, when that happens, we will see a dip in profitability, not necessarily in revenue, and that was the case for us in April. In this episode, we share some of the projects we have been working on, such as some exciting shop website updates and a very niche copywriting assignment, and we also discuss the benefits of choosing when not to invest, especially when it comes at the cost of truly trusting yourself! Tuning in, you’ll hear about some of the lessons we have learned over the past month, the past year, and the past 18 to 24 months, including the value of exposing yourself to other cultures, perspectives, ideas, and even industries. We also reflect on some of the mistakes we have made in order to help you avoid making the same mistakes in the future, so make sure not to miss this episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, on the podcast, we welcome Emily Walker. She helps brilliant entrepreneurs turn their big ideas into powerful and profitable courses so they can improve thousands of other people’s lives while building more spaciousness into their own. Having worked with a diverse range of clientele all over the globe, from groundbreaking courses and bestselling authors to seven-figure mindset queens, Emily knows that, sure, you can just dive in and start teaching online, but taking that knowledge and tweaking it into something actionable is not always easy. If you have ever wanted to create a course, a program, a workshop, a masterclass, a tiny offer, a big offer, it doesn’t matter; this episode is going to give you a lot of great things to think about before you get started! Emily shares her perspective on creating content by doing equal parts what feels fun and good to you while also serving your audience, your clients, or your future students. It’s a blend of both worlds, and Abigail and Emylee certainly walked away from this conversation with a lot of ideas and questions to ask themselves as they refresh some of their own programs, and we know you will too! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We run ads for everything under the sun, and we have for a long time. Something we did very early on was making a conscious decision to not look at the comments on ads because sometimes there are just troll-type comments, and we don’t need to leave our headspace there. Funnily enough, Abagail’s husband is our ad comment moderator, so it is very rare for us to see a negative comment. But, for some reason, the other day, Emylee was scrolling one of our new Creative Template Shop ads, which is so beautiful and cute. The ad contains our slogan which we have been using for over a year. Emylee was compelled to look at the comment, which was along the lines of, “Oh, so that’s all that marketing is, is beautiful graphics? That's not all that marketing is, so it’s weird that you say that.” The specifics of the comment aren’t that important, but we do want to have a conversation not only about what marketing is, but what marketing means to two visual artists, and why we have our Creative Template Shop slogan, which was very intentional. We believe that it’s something that really makes our business stand out from anything else that we see out there. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show, we have Monica Schrock, who is cautiously optimistic and is an introverted copywriter who works as a marketing consultant. She has a mean coffee habit and a serious nerd streak. She revels at the intersection between intention and strategy, hoping to make the world a better place one word at a time. Monica has spent the last 14 years navigating the extroverted field of marketing, helping 200 clients craft their brand message and increase their sales from double to over ten times. We are talking about all the tips and tricks she has learned on that journey on the show today.  So, if you resonate as a fellow introverted entrepreneur, who started their business to maybe escape ever having to talk to anyone again, and then realizing that you have to do that in order to make sales, put your offer out there, and grow your business, this episode is for you. We are talking about how to set boundaries, how to schedule (or not schedule) your week in a way that fits your personality so that you can actually get stuff done without feeling guilty and feel like you’re putting marketing and sales messaging out there that doesn’t make you feel icky.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are going to talk about doing #allthethings, or rather, not doing them. We know a lot of you have so many things on your plate and are really struggling with what to let go of. You are feeling married to every department that you are the head of, and not really seeing or understanding how you could give up any of those things. So with that in mind, we want to holler at you in the way that we do best and permit you and help you let go of some stuff if you have been trudging along in your workspace, your day, and your business. We used to be the people who didn’t only not want to pay to give up things but also were super intimidated and concerned with delegation. It has been something we have had to work hard to do because we used to be aware of everything that happens in our business and we were at the point where if we didn’t let go of some of it, we were going to slow down the business. So we have had some life experience in this department and hope you can take away some of the lessons we have learned and apply them in your own life and business after this episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show, we are excited to welcome Abbey Ashley, Founder of The Virtual Savvy. Abbey has helped aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. She started her own virtual assistant business as a new mom and was able to double her salary from her full-time corporate job in just 30 days! She has since gone on to grow a seven-figure business with 19 employees and certainly has some key insights to share about how to hire to scale. It's now her passion to help others start their own VA businesses so they too can taste the freedom and flexibility of entrepreneurship. She is currently building a brand new platform, which you will hear about towards the end of the interview, that is going to make hiring so much easier, especially for creative entrepreneurs, connecting you with virtual assistants that are going to stick around and be the right fit for you and your company. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the hiring process, particularly how to hire for a culture fit over a skill fit. We think that that is one of the most remarkable things that Abbey has unlocked within her own business, and it has definitely been one of the key elements that has factored into her incredible success. We discuss how to identify your brand culture, how to speak that into existence within your team, and how to support your team through that journey, as well as how to hire for the perfect fit, of course. Whether you are ready to hire your first VA or dip your toes into hiring employees, this episode is full of practical tips that will be beneficial to you, no matter where you are on that journey. Make sure to tune into this insightful interview with The Virtual Savvy Founder and powerhouse entrepreneur, Abbey Ashley! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you are in the small business space as a buyer or a seller, you might have noticed a wave of disgruntled online shoppers that don’t necessarily fit the stereotype that wants to speak to the manager! In today’s episode, we want to talk about what we are dubbing the Digital Karen. Since the start of the pandemic, Emylee and Abigail have noticed more and more conversations between makers, shoppers, and sellers who are having a difficult time dealing with the increase in customer service issues that have been popping up in their inboxes and DMs, from unrealistic custom order requests to one-star reviews for reasons that are beyond their control.  There has been a growing need for customer education regarding what is and what isn’t within the control of shop owners and business owners. For a long time, buyers have convoluted the experience of buying from big companies like Amazon or Nordstrom and tied that same level of expectation to shops on Etsy and Shopify, for example. In today’s episode, Emylee and Abagail talk about how sellers can emotionally and mentally deal with the age of the Digital Karen and create a positive customer service experience amidst uncontrollable delays, as well as what buyers and shoppers can do to make the experience better for business owners! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we welcome Rachel Rodgers, woman of color, mother of four, and seven-figure business owner – in that order. Rachel started her career working on The Hill with nonprofits, federal judges, and Hillary Clinton. When she realized that changing the world is easier when you have some cash in your bank account, she decided to build a million-dollar business and then teach other women how to do the same. Her forthcoming book, We Should All Be Millionaires, from Harper’s Leadership is due to publish in Spring 2021. For this show, we break down our favorite parts of Rachel’s book, which not only addresses our ingrained mindsets around money issues but also provides activities you can do, from homework assignments to different mindset reframes to help you better your headspace, grow, and move forward, whether you have a business or you just want to be a literal millionaire! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quarantine gave Abagail every excuse to drop any kind of consistency around movement, and now, a full year later, she is trying to get back at it. She has walked three days in a row, and just yesterday Emylee did her first Peloton bike ride in months. After eight minutes in, she felt like she couldn’t do it, but she kept going. But this isn’t what we are going to be talking about today. We are super excited because it’s been a while since we have done an episode like this, where we share a small tweak we made inside our business program that was uber effective.  It actually kind of blew us away just how much of a difference it made. It's been almost a year since we made this two-phased change. We want to talk to you about it today because if you are offering services or packages and there are deliverables inside those packages that don’t cost you any money but do cost you time, those are sometimes the easiest things to add into a package to add value. There are also instances where you need to re-evaluate what those deliverables are and whether that thing is actually effective, not only for you but your clients as well. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Dr. Lindsay Padilla, Founder of Hello Audio, a SaaS product that lets users easily create private audio feeds their customers can listen to anywhere, anytime! She has been building this SaaS product from the ground up. It has been fascinating to watch from the sidelines and we are excited for you guys to dive in. For the first half of this episode, Lindsay gives us a true, honest, behind-the-scenes look at everything it takes both mentally and logistically to build software. Everything that she wanted to create from the hole she saw in the market of audio and how course creators can deliver amazing content to their students and how Lindsay could make that happen. She talks about breaking down barriers in a male-dominated space, learning things in the tech space, raising money, deciding to bootstrap or not, and everything in between. And then at the end of the episode, we talk about what is actually Hello Audio and how could you as a service-based business owner, online course creator, educator, use this platform to better your customer experience and to add more value. You get a peek into the stuff that Abagail and Emylee have been thinking about doing in their business and ideas for what you can use in your own one to help you grow and create an amazing experience for the people you already have. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We always knew there would be this moment where, after doing these profit reports, we would eventually hit our goal, and then we would have to have the conversation about what’s next for us. We alluded to it a bit last month, where we had our first loss in over a year, but no part of Abagail was concerned. It sounds bizarre, but we really stuck things out, made some subtle shifts, and March went fantastically. What a concept! We had a loss and didn’t let it linger in our brains for months on end, which, in turn, would have impacted our business for months on end. Instead, we did a turnaround and saw some amazing stuff happen for us in March. It's funny because it’s not like we did this massive launch or any other big things. We just checked the calendar right before we recorded this to remind ourselves of what happened last month. We planned some stuff; we talked about some stuff; we did a mini-thing, well, someone else did a mini-thing; we invested in some stuff. That's about it! It was lowkey in terms of what was happening behind the scenes. But so much of what we have been doing over the last year has been about building our monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on our show, we have Ariel Kuhn, who started out as a photographer and has since grown her business to focus more on brand strategy, working with small business owners as they figure out how to grow online. She helps these businesses with everything from brand strategy to photography, copywriting, web design, and mentorship so they can take their business to the next level. Ariel has been around the Boss Project TCC block for a while, and she is actually a current Strategy Academy student. She shares the evolution of her business, why she decided to invest in the program, the art of her pivot, what it means to her to feel good about what you’re doing in your business, and what to do with all the extra ideas you might have. We also discuss various things she has learned in the program that could help other small business owners who are in a similar position. So, if you have an existing business and have been stressing out about all of the brilliant ideas you have in your brain and what to do next, this episode will give you clarity. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you start the hiring process it can be a challenging time with a lot to think about. There are a lot of decisions to be made about how or why you hire someone at a certain point in your business. We have talked about it in the past but today we want to talk about why it is important that you think first about how and where you will get a return on your hire rather than hiring to save time. This is because we know what hiring to save time looks like and we are in a different space to be able to talk about it. So many people only hire to save time and they should be thinking about it in a bigger way. We want to have this conversation coming from the space of how we think about it now with Boss Project and lessons we have learned, but also there are one-off hires that Emylee has done for her earring business. She hired for stuff she knew she would save a ton of time on. She also wasn’t the best one to do these tasks and if they were done, she would make money faster. So it is interesting how this question of hiring can be viewed in different scopes based on where you are at in your business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today our guest is Jennifer Turner, the founder of Gemini where she helps online business owners improve their copywriting and design to create higher conversion rates. Gemini is an online branding and education platform and Jennifer is the rare combination of a trained copywriter and designer! Their MO is unifying a business' voice in the copy and design to tell a stronger story. We love it! Today we will be focussing solely on the copy side of things and how to get your up to scratch!  We are super excited for Jennifer to dive into her four-step formula for high converting copy and it is honestly one of the best formulas we have found in a long time! These kinds of frameworks can sometimes put you in a box or make you sound a bit robotic and this one is a really cool way to insert your story and your audience's story while coming up with something that gets your conversion rate all the way up! This can be used for freebies, opt-ins or paid services and programs, it can be applied in those areas just as effectively, that's how versatile it is, so get your notes ready and let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends! It has been a minute since we have talked about the other businesses that we run. We thought it was high time for a little update because Abagail has something new and exciting that she has launched (by the time you hear this it will have been out for a minute). We are going to talk about that but we also think there have been some decisions that we have made very intentionally in our side businesses that we want to break down the logistics behind. We share these things with you, first of all, because it is fun to chat about, but it is also fair for you guys to hear this part of the process because it gives you a look behind the curtain of something new and growing. It also shows you the reality of how a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners are, which is multi-passionate! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Relationships can make all the difference in your business and as many of us have learned, focussing on connections and networking in the right way can take your biz from quiet to booming! Our guest today is Jaclyn Mellon and she helps experts exponentially grow their businesses by becoming an authority in their space. One of the ways that she helps them do this is through authentic relationships. Jaclyn is a coach, strategist, keynote speaker, momma, guac lover and host of the Go-to Gal Podcast! In this episode, she shares how to create strategic relationships and how to utilize them as more than friendships without being weird about it! For Jaclyn, it all starts with an authentic connection and she breaks down exactly what that looks like. We also talk about how this translates into creating more friends in your own space and work environment and how to utilize these to continue to grow your business in the long term. We cover leveraging relationships, creating intimate connections that fill your cup and how to jumpstart your biz in a big way! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is another one of those episodes where Abagail puts Emylee on the spot in front of the audience. She knows nothing and is expected to come up with something on air. For context, we started our business as creative entrepreneurs and designers and all that. What we did not realize we were doing at the time was influencing people. We started this blog, we were putting out content, and ultimately, a large portion of our business has become what we would call affiliate marketing. It makes up a big percentage of what we are doing. So, Abagail has all this background knowledge of what it takes to be influencers in an affiliate capacity and has made all of these pivots with her second brand to broaden the ways she is bringing in money for this brand. Emylee is admittedly the laziest influencer out there. It is not that she doesn’t influence people; she definitely does, and there are many examples to prove it. In technical terms, Abagail, based on the size of her audience, would be seen as a micro-influencer. There are so many people out there that want to be influencers that they don’t necessarily know what they need to be looking out for. There are some alarming things that brands are starting to include in their contracts, and micro-influencers are agreeing to these things, most probably without any idea of what they actually mean. And they could not only negatively impact your business, but they could destroy your online reputation if you do not pay attention to what is going on. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Kristin Ostrander from Mommy Income. She is an e-commerce expert who got her start 17 years ago on eBay. She has since transitioned to Amazon where she has been a serial entrepreneur who has learned all the ins and outs of how to run a successful wholesale business selling on the platform. Today she touches on her wholesale bundle system and how she’s helped thousands of students through her online course and podcast. In this episode, we talk about a product offering, revenue stream, and selling platform that we’ve never talked about on the podcast before: Amazon, and more specifically, selling wholesale bundles on Amazon. Honestly, there was so much information that we did not know. So we really think you guys will get a lot of good ideas from this episode if you’re interested in selling a new product, getting a second stream of revenue up and running or just testing your toes in running a business that might be a little different to what everyone else is doing. Kristin breaks down her strategies in the order that she did stuff really, really well, and has some incredible resources for you guys to keep learning if you want to find out how to sell on Amazon. We’re sure this show will give you a lot of great ideas! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We feel like the anniversary of the global pandemic that is quickly approaching is hitting us really hard! We just want to remind all of you business owners out there that you have been running a business for the last year in the midst of one of the craziest years any of us will ever go through, especially as a collective. For us, running a business in the midst of all this has been the most surprising thing that has ever happened, because March 2020 was the most afraid we have ever been about the future of our business. A year later though, we are now more confident than ever that we will continue to grow! We have spoken a lot about the different areas of our business that we have invested in and how they change over time. We want to spend today’s profit report for February talking about how these decisions have ultimately affected our profit and how we are looking at this side of things. We want to talk about why things are just incredibly different now than they were last year and the place of greater maturity at which we have arrived with regards to the way we cope with the supposed ups and downs. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Melissa Harstine. She helps creatives, coaches, and consultants land next-level clients with customer-centric copy and gripping case studies. As a trained journalist, she leverages her research and interview superpowers to write killer copy that makes readers think, “holy guacamole, did they read my journal?!” We’re breaking down everything about case studies today; what they are, how you can use them to land more clients, how you can use them to vet your clients, and to work with your dream clients. We also dive into how you should set up the interview, how to transcribe it, and how to repurpose your content. Everything about this process makes it seem so tangible and 100% worth it!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, so this is going to be a rambling conversation that we still feel you guys will get a lot of benefit from. This conversation has come up multiple times with a good friend of ours who you all know, Jessica Eley, and in Emylee’s maker community as well. Abagail and Emylee have also had this conversation between themselves over and over, and with their students too, so it is something that definitely affects many people. The overarching concept is how to separate your self-worth from the success of your business. We are going to share a few tangible strategies that we have picked up recently, but we want to open the conversation by saying that if you struggle with this problem, we want to give you some examples of what you can do to help yourself feel better. These are things that we have learned ourselves and also lessons that other creatives have helped us to learn. So tune in and hear about how you can learn to identify this self-sabotaging behavior and, if you suffer from it, how you can learn to manage it and be kinder to yourself going forward. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Courtney Chaal, the founder of The Rule Breaker’s Club where she teaches women to package and sell with brilliance and offers awesome products, and her work has been featured in Inc., Creative Live, and The Huffpost to name only a few. She is crazy-talented when it comes to messaging specifically, so this interview is right on time. We get that we shouldn’t necessarily be changing our offers or postpone our launches, but how do we talk differently about our services, so that it appeals to people at this moment?  What messaging do we need to tweak to make it relevant, and where is the balance between being empathetic and helpful versus making sales because we’ve got businesses to run? Courtney shares the top tips that she herself is implementing in her business, from getting your mindset right and brainstorming ideas, to asking your audience what they need and putting it all together in a project plan, so strap in and let’s dive in!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any business that is selling through a one-to-many system is going to, at some point, debate whether or not their strategy is worth their time and energy. That’s why today, we are going to talk a little bit about why we decided to roll out our affiliate program, as well as some of the logistics behind setting it up. When it comes to affiliate programs, there are a few mysteries that need solving, like what kind of software is out there and how to make it work in your business. We are also going to focus on some of the aspects that didn’t make sense for us in the past, because like we said: affiliate programs aren’t always the best idea. So join us and get the lowdown on the dos and definitely don’ts of setting up an affiliate program.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Kaye Putnam. Kaye is is a psychology-driven brand strategist for entrepreneurs. Through work with over 100 clients, from Fortune 50’s to entrepreneurs, she developed the In Demand Brand method. She has had some crazy success though with her famous opt-in. 55,000 people have taken her psychology quiz all about branding and ya’ll need to take it too. Inside this episode, all three of us nerd out pretty hardcore. We talk about the psychology behind understanding your competition and establishing your brand presence. We uncover a couple of the most popular archetypes and the least popular ones. Kaye brings to the conversation a different way of looking at your brand, your messaging, and what you’re serving to your clients based on what you are actually best at and who you are as a human being, which is like the easiest and the best thing to do, right? Of course, we also talk about her quiz, and the strategy behind how she set that up, how she has collected the leads, and what it’s meant for her financially. This a good one to listen to just to uncover a little bit more about yourself and how you can use that to craft your brand messaging to your benefit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in the day, we reported an entire series on starting your business and one of the first subjects we talked about was adopting a profit-first mentality. Here’s the thing, we re-looked at that episode and have so many more things to say! The way we run our business has dramatically shifted in the last 12 months and because of that, we have so many things to say to people who are just getting started. Even if you have an established business, we have some thoughts about what you should be doing differently when it comes to your dollar bills. We recorded that first episode about adopting a profit-first mentality in February of 2018 but we honestly didn’t really put our ideas into practice until 2020! It took two years for us to learn how to do that, so we are going to save you that time today. We are not saying that that first episode has no value, but now that we have actually been through the trenches, this is the episode you want! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Krystina Benedetti of The Messy Cookie. She is a lifelong entrepreneur who has grown her love of baking into a business and started spreading her joy through COVID. She has left her full-time job and has built an online business that offers virtual Cookie Ice Nights and she is also making all these amazing custom cookies. We love this girl, she is so amazing!  Krystina is soon to be a Strategy Academy alumni! She is not even a year through our course, hasn’t even celebrated her first birthday with us, and has already done super amazing things in her business, like putting in her notice to leave her retail job to pursue her cookie business full-time. We break down everything that she has gone through in the last eight months that has led up to the moment where she felt comfortable and ready to leave her job. We talk about what she had logistically prepared for, how she got there mentally, what investing in her business looked like to her, and how she tackled the program and made the most of it to see the most traction. If you are interested in the Strategy Academy, we have a free training video that you can watch here. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A couple of episodes ago, we teased at the end that we were already going into what could be a whole other conversation. This is that conversation. We are going to be sharing some tidbits that we have learned and have deliberately decided to do or not to do in Boss Project and within our side business to seek growth and to keep our business and our companies in the range we want them to be. This is based on what we do and don’t want to do in that job. We know this sounds confusing but stick with us, and we will break it all down. We really want you to go and listen to episode 512 because at the end we start this conversation, so it might make a little more sense to listen to that one first. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we welcome Aandra Bohlen, sales guru, inspiring friend, and all-round badass! She is here to demystify the sigmas around selling and the ways it is being taught. Her work is centered on developing and teaching entrepreneurs to create an amazing enrolment experience that leads to high conversion rates. She is an expert on sales calls and mentality and if you did not get the point already, she has it going on! We are going to talk about getting your mindset right and some real techniques for conversion so you are not going to want to miss this, we promise! Aandra has almost 30 years of experience in sales and we are so lucky to get to throw a bunch of questions at her, things we know you would love to have answered. We discuss getting past money-mentality blocks, perfecting your pitch and how to translate sales onto social media and your content creation process. Aandra has a bunch of great reframes of the sales thought process and we promise that this conversation is going to help do better and think better about your sales game. We also have a great activity that we really want you to do, so stay tuned for that! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's 2021, and we are diving into our profit reports. If you are new to this segment of the show, we really like to dive deep into what it takes to run an online business while avoiding comparison and not having to question your every move. So, instead of sharing dollars and cents, we share percentages, and we share strategies. We also dive into sharing behind-the-scenes thoughts and actions so you can see what makes sense for you without having to worry about whether you are in the right place and questioning where you’re at.  We have a good accompanying episode to this one, where we break down the strategies we are trying to tackle for this quarter, and more specifically, we break down the accompanying expenses to those strategies. So if you want to hear more about them, definitely listen to that episode too. Now, without further ado, let’s dive in to today’s profit report. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Melissa Fryer. She is a creative artist, who has been in the professional baking industry for sixteen years and she noticed that people needed to find out more information about building their own baking business. But this was not until after she moved to the middle of the desert, had to leave another business behind, and start all over again with the help of Strategy Academy. Melissa is one of our rockstar, OG Strategy Academy students who have truly taken the program to a tee of how it was designed. We brought her on to not only get a peek behind the curtain of her business but to follow along with her thought processes and different strategies that she implemented in her business with how she was learning and what she was learning from the program. You’ll get a good glimpse today behind Melissa’s business that has succeeded and continues to succeed and thrive as she has taken pivots and made different decisions and tweaks based on not only what she is learning from our program but by knowing her audience and herself as her life has changed. This is exactly what we designed the program for – your life and not the other way round. So we are going to talk about the Strategy Academy a lot today but you are also going to get so many good tips about memberships, monetizing a Facebook group, how to grow an email list, and how to identify your offer depending on your lifestyle. Learn more about Strategy Academy here. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, we’re finally here for the episode we’d said we were going to give you. We are going to share a sneak peek behind the scenes of what we are doing and what we are focussing on for Q1, including not just big projects, but also some exciting shifts we’ve had in our team! If you have been following us for any length of time, you know we do a big planning dream-dump and break down our quarters into these “sexy chunks,” as we refer to them. Historically speaking, Q1 has always been a time for us to reevaluate and to really clean up and optimize our existing systems. That’s worked for us because, in terms of outside obligations, we are home the most in Q1. We also have the least going on with others in our business and we can really focus on what’s going on internally. It’s a great time to haul in and not go anywhere, especially because it’s the worst part of winter. So when we have no choice but to be cooped up inside, we use it as an opportunity to perfect everything for the rest of their year so that when spring blooms, we can come out of our shells ready and prepared. Join us today and get the three-step blueprint to our 2021 Q1 masterplan. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Strategy Hour Podcast today, we are joined by the wonderful and amazing Rachel Green! She is one of the first people we connected with when we were starting out in the online business world and she has been in business for the last seven years, helping hundreds of businesses grow and succeed. As a brand strategist, designer and educator, Rachel has generated over 5 million dollars in sales for her clients and her focus on empowering female business owners is truly inspiring! In this episode, we are breaking down what a brand strategy is, why it is important to start there, and the questions that you need to ask when figuring this all out. Rachel offers some great thoughts to work through in order to help you make sure your story and brand are pushing you forward. She is all about progression, not just pretty branding and logos! We really respect Rachel's perspective on the strategic part of branding and we know you will all find it very useful. So buckle up and let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you want to increase your sales? Of course, you do, we all do! There are so many strategies out there on how to do this and today we are picking out four that we use and that have been highly effective for us! We hope that sharing this with you will help you to decide which strategies are best for you and your hustle. When we speak about our work we are referring to Boss Project, our main thing and then each of our own side gigs. Some of the strategies have worked better in different places but we will be unpacking all of that, do not worry! The cool thing is that you get to try these out for yourself and see which suits you. We want you to think about which fits with your goals and lifestyle, as well as its conversion efficacy. These are the most important metrics for you to keep an eye on while testing things out. Don't forget to keep the conversation going over on Instagram, you know we love to hear from you, so hit us up with any thoughts or questions! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we have two of our good friends and product-based business gurus on the show. First up is Rachel Allene, who Abagail met years ago at a creative entrepreneur conference. They have stayed friends, and Abagail has watched her hand calligraphy business grow into what it is today. She makes all kinds of products that are not necessarily handmade but rather, hand-lettered. We're comparing and contrasting that with our other guest, Emylee's friend, Mia Graves. We are so excited to hear from her because we love the way her marketing and business brain works. She makes polymer clay earrings and also sells cutters for polymer clay makers. She has two different business models, and in this episode, we are breaking down a deliberate sellout, restock model strategy and the mentality behind it, why it works, why it's hard sometimes, who it's right for, and the pros and cons both for you as the maker and for the customer. We hear about the journeys Rachel and Mia have been on and the slight tweaks they have made to their selling mechanisms, strategies, and marketing in order to please more people and not go absolutely insane. This roundtable discussion will give you some really great insights into the product world. You have asked for more product-focused content, and this information is coming from two very smart women. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, so we are putting an introduction on the top of this episode because we had every intention to talk about all of our plans for Q1 and the cool, exciting stuff that we are trying, the people we recently hired, and the strategies we are starting. And then, somehow, we got down a rabbit hole of intuitive business ownership, contentment, our problem with happiness, and everything in between! So we are going to save our episode about Q1 for another time, and what you are hearing today is slightly different than what you think you might be getting ready to hear! But it is still a really good episode, so stay until the very end. We also have a disclaimer that relates to a lot of what we say today at the very end, so you need to stay till then to hear it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Cami Monet, a watercolor artist, and custom wedding stationer. She is all about paper goods with purpose and personality. Camille Monet operates under two branches where she has custom wedding clients and does all their custom stationery. Her product line is also available for both retail and wholesale. When she isn’t doing all of these things, she also has a podcast with a friend, where they share ways to make business strategy a piece of cake for paper people. In this episode, we’re talking a little bit about processes, using Dubsado, and all about how to create a high-touch premium service with your clients. This is for anyone who wants to dip their toe into charging premium prices this year, and for those who are already offering premium services. This episode will also give you some good ideas on how to be high-touch without having to be in the process every time. Camille shares details about her speedy process on getting clients in the door and paying. The customization and personality aspect of her process is unlike any other that we have heard of, so we know you guys are going to get some really good takeaways today. Let’s get going! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2020 feels a bit like a lifetime ago, even though we are only a few weeks into January. Even though we projected and gave you some ideas of where we might land, we are still so surprised with how last year ended up going for us. For all of us, 2020 will be a standout year for good and bad reasons. For us, it was ridiculous how our business year ended up. When big things happen in the world, you don’t know how they’re going to impact you, your partner, your family, your business, the climate, and the people buying your product. Everything. Being in charge of how you make money is sometimes scary when you can’t control all of those scenarios. So, we are so thankful that we had the time and space in January 2020 to set the expectations of what we wanted to do, and more importantly, what we didn’t want to do for the year. This really helped because when shit hit the fan (and continued to hit the fan throughout the year), we were really focused on securing our foundation. And, in December 2020, this is what caught us.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we speak with Dresean Ryan. He started his SEO career only four years ago after bootstrapping it and learning everything he could because he wanted to make a better life for himself. Dresean has gone on to work with some large companies like Etna, Signa, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. He helps his clients make millions of dollars just by improving their search engine optimization.  Today we are diving into how you can DIY this process and how you can learn how to hire the right kind of person. Dresean breaks down SEO in an easily-understandable, digestible way to keep things simple for you. He supplies listeners with actionable steps that have to do with outlining your content, deciding what your content should be, and creating that content. To do this, Dresean uses a bunch of cool tools both free and paid, and references his amazing resources at the end, including his very own program that you can use or even pass on to your VA. This ensures that even if you’re not up to speed with SEO in your business, someone on your team definitely will be. Let’s get to it then! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We get a million DMs from people saying they are ready to strike out on their own and telling us they will listen and start with services. If you have been listening for some time now, you will know just how much we believe in service-based businesses. But before you do anything, as always, we recommend you listen to our second episode, back in 2017, the year we launched the show, where we had Abagail on as a guest.  In that episode, Emylee interviewed her to find out how she replaced her corporate income after getting laid off. Since we reference that episode a billion times, we thought it would be fun to do a 2021 version, where we find out how Abagail would handle the same situation today. Some of the things might be similar, but what are the new strategies Abagail would leverage now? Technology and marketing have changed so much that there are sure to be a few new ways to bounce back quicker.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us today on the podcast is Kali Rogers, the Founder of Blush Online Life Coaching, a life coaching business aimed at female millennials. Kali is here to teach us more about the super do-able, fun, and stress-free Pinterest strategies that have boosted their site traffic and sales and grown their clients and customers. The best of all? You don’t need a Pinterest marketing degree to implement them, you can start today! If you have a Pinterest account but have stopped using it for some reason, we hope this episode will inspire you to get back into it, or if you have been utilizing this potentially awesome tool, that you will get what you need to brush up your skills even more.  In the beginning, Kali used Pinterest for personal reasons such as recipes and fashion inspo, until she decided to take a break. At first she didn’t see how Pinterest, a mostly visual medium, would be applicable to Blush, a service-based business. How would she promote a life coaching business through images? When she first started she didn’t have any entrepreneurial skills but realized that she needed to communicate to people that she and her team knew what they were talking about. She resorted to writing as a cheap, safe means of publicity, creating numerous articles for The Huffington Post, including “An Open Letter From Introverts To Everyone Else”, which went completely viral. Many people have a Pinterest account when they first get started in business, but then they get distracted along the line and stop using it on a regular basis. In this episode we are going to show you that, even though it’s an oldie, it’s still a real goodie. So be sure to join us for this awesome conversation! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we get to talk about one of our favorite things — meetings! While most people hate them, we are going to share a few things that might change your mind. Meetings are notorious for consuming a lot of time, often with little real progress, but we will present you with an outline that will make your every meeting from here on out a super productive, efficient one. We’ve spoken about the book Traction many times, but we want to remind you once more to go read it because this is where this outline and our guidelines around meetings come from.  Sometimes a meeting is not necessary and a Slack message or quick update will suffice, but other times having a meeting makes sense, and therefore it’s important to know how to approach them. Having a weekly meeting keeps all parties fully informed on decisions that were made, as it can be easy to think that everybody is in the loop when they’re not. If you are someone who has little patience for inefficiency and is always looking for the quickest, most productive ways to communicate and do things, this outline is perfect for you! This is as applicable to small teams as it is big ones, and don’t hesitate to ask your contractor to attend these meetings. Be sure to tune in to this episode to get the best strategy for efficient meetings!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Jordan Gill. Jordan is an operations consultant and the founder of Systems Saved Me. She helps overwhelmed, one-woman shows become streamlined solopreneurs and her jam is creating a cohesive operating system for managing your tasks, files, and inbox. But today we are actually talking about something that could really change the game for you if you are running a service-based business. If you are the type of service-based babe who resents client workloads and is not a fan of the lengthy, back-and-forth communications, and is thinking about changing your entire business because you are almost on the brink of burnout, we encourage you to listen to this episode first!  What we are sharing today is all about VIP days. With VIP days, you’ll create an amazing, lengthy, costly, profit-inducing service for your clients that also leaves them with a great impression of you. VIP days will also help you to free up your time for the rest of the year so you can do other things in your business. Jordan shares all about how she structures VIP days, how they changed her business, the lessons they taught her as a creative, and how you can implement them in your own business. Spoiler alert – in part of this episode we are talking about using a system that is going to make your VIP experience even better. And that system is Dubsado! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our 500th episode! That means we have spoken on air for 22,500 minutes or 16 days, and we are not going anywhere anytime soon. For us, there is no shortage of things to say about business, life, and everything in between. We could talk for 500 more episodes on all of these things! Today's show will be a smorgasbord of us talking about our memories, favorite highlights, not just of the show, but being in business in general. We discuss some of the cool things the show has done for us, our best episodes, and everything in between. We are so proud we have made it to 500, and with no plans of slowing down anytime soon, you don’t have to worry about not hearing our beautiful voices. We have had so much fun and are so grateful that we continued with the podcast despite the ebbs and flows of a business. Often creative projects fall by the wayside, but this podcast has stayed steady for three years, and we could not be prouder. We are not sure how we kept it going for so long when other things, like our blog, got cut after some time. While we are back blogging once a week, this podcast has been the one constant alongside our business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s episode, we are super-duper excited to host Ashley Knight of The Hello Boss Community. Ashley founded the community as a means to support and bolster other businesswomen who were in the same boat as her. Through her group, she is able to teach and coach strategy to an ever-growing number of dedicated members and she loves it! And we love her for it! Here at the Strategy Hour Podcast, we know the value of groups we have run and been a part of, they can be the lifeboat bringing you back in when you are out at sea, so we know exactly what Ashley is talking about! In our discussion, we cover the early stages of starting a supportive community, relationships within this space, real-world events, social media, sensitivity masterminds and much more. Ashley is one of the most dedicated community founders we have spoken to and we are sure her attitude and advice is going to be wonderfully useful and inspiring to all of out listeners. So whether you are part of an online community or looking to start one yourself, this is definitely the episode for you. Listen in to get the low-down. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to plan the year ahead? It might be easier to do when you’ve had a great 2020 but, even then, you can plan to stick to the plan! We know that we just want more of what we had but we are also keen to try new things too. In 2020, we found the sweet spot of consistent and boring and realized that they are our middle names. We embrace them, we love them, and this is where we flourish and feel comfortable. While it’s not flashy or sexy and it doesn’t do dances on TikTok, we are 100% okay with that! Not all of us dream of making seven figures. For some of us, our businesses are perfect the way they are when they work for us instead of us for them. In other words, while you might not roll in the dough, if you are satisfied with what your business brings in and it supports you to the extent that it suits your lifestyle, who cares about the rest? It is worth remembering that you risk much more when you try to grow and scale your business aggressively, and many have closed their doors after pursuing exponential growth instead of keeping to the stable and consistent things. We would like to be around, no matter what happens in the world, and we believe that we can do that by doing more of the same-old. This strategy will not get us on Oprah’s couch or anything spectacular like that, and we don’t have $10 million growth plans, but tune in to hear how we are planning to bring boring, stable, and consistent back! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi! Let’s take it back to the month of turkey days! We feel like with the holidays you quickly forget how November went, because you just roll straight into the next holiday, get distracted by family, and shopping, and cookies. Emylee promises to make Abagail some marsh-mellows again this year, but instead of talking about marsh-mellows for the whole episode which we definitely could do, we are here for another profit report!  If you are new here you should know that we now have well over a year’s worth of episodes where we share profit reports with you. We made a goal at the end of 2019 to focus more on profit – keeping more profit within our business to make more money and pay ourselves instead of reaching huge, sexy revenue goals, and our business drastically changed because of that mindset. So now, every month we share with you the breakdown of expenses, profit, where the money went – a breakdown of products in our company, so you can be inspired to do the same breakdown within yours! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Liz Rishel from Within the Grove. For the last five years, Liz has grown her blog and Instagram to become an influencer to watch! We have loved observing her journey since she was a Strategy Academy student who accomplished amazing things and, in this episode, we pick her brain about what she has done to get such phenomenal results.  We’ve often talked about blogging and making money from working with brands and have given our listeners some insights into how this all works, and Liz is here to give us her perspective on the whole thing. She gives us a peek behind the curtain of her growth over the past five years, getting into when it became a full-time job, how many hours she had to put in before it became a viable financial option for her and her family, how she collaborates with brands, her engagement with followers, and creating amazing products in her own home. Be sure to tune in for an episode that might just inspire you to start your next DIY project or finally get that online business of yours off the ground!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Dolly DeLong. She is a photographer and she has been in business since 2006. In 2020 she started educating small business owners on how to go from scattered to streamlined using powerful tools like Dubsado. This episode is jam-packed with her exact framework, the TASK method, that is going to walk you through how she utilizes it in her business to really streamline her interactions with potential clients and actually turn those prospects into clients. Abagail had a ton of fun interviewing her because Emylee was on a little MIA for this episode. Shocking, we know! But Abagail knows she can still make it work! If you haven’t been introduced to the wonders of Dubsado yet, after this episode you most definitely will want to. If you haven’t signed up for a free trial yet, visit this link, and upgrade when you are ready! You can get 50% off your first month or year with the code BOSSPROJECT at checkout! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How are we able to talk about the end of 2020 already? We don’t know because this has been the fastest, craziest year in life and business for us in a while. For a while, it felt like we were having the longest months, and then things just seemed to speed up. We think a lot of people have had a similar experience. We don’t know if it was because people were home and things didn’t feel like they were changing and then suddenly it was fall and then winter. And now Christmas is around the corner! How are we at this point in the year already? So today we want to talk about 2020 specifically and what happened in our businesses. If you look at all the goals we set for 2020, how did things ultimately shape up? We will tell you, we don’t know if there were guardian angels above us but there were a few things we did really differently in Q1 that ultimately set us up for huge success, and in today’s show you will hear all about it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking to Emylee’s good friend, Mia Graves. She is another maker from a tiny town in Northern Alabama but she is now a Louisville transplant. She has a background in politics, philosophy, and economics but she has a maker-based business where she makes jewelry called Honey Bee Clay. She specializes in handmade and 3D printed clay cutters and, as a total side note, she also has a talking dog named Gus! But we are not talking about Gus today, we are talking about marketing strategies, and while Mia isn’t formally trained in marketing, she is really smart when it comes to this side of business. We are talking about how she uses the magic of call to actions anywhere and everywhere she can to direct her clients, customers, fans, and followers to go from one platform to another with the end goal of making her money.  She shares all of her customers’ journeys and the different things she uses like Instagram, DMs, comments, TikTok, and email to get people to follow her and buy from her on a continued basis. We also talk about an exclusive Facebook group that she just recently started and her opinions on sellout launches and everything in between. Regardless of whether you have a physical, product-based business or not, the marketing strategies taught here today are going to help your business and give it a new life if you have hit a wall in your growth or engagement, so be sure to take notes during this one! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emylee is back from a much-needed break, but now she feels like she has forgotten how to do her job! Getting back into business mode with Boss Project is also different from returning to her side hustle, since the more creative tasks use another side of the brain. It got her thinking about overwhelm and taking breaks and thought it’s high time they did an episode on honoring your creative process. Abagail, on the other hand, is in the middle of a big house move and, as they both want to take a break over December, they find themselves in an interesting place. Abagail finds that, after a busy day, it is more relaxing and energizing to do something creative rather than vegging out on the couch. Once Emylee got back into her clay-making studio, she also had an idea for a pair of earrings she wanted to get out, surprising herself with creativity she didn’t even think she had at that point.   If you feel like you lack creativity, feel overwhelmed, and get stuck comparing yourself with everybody else, this episode will help you navigate these ‘meh’ situations and get your creative fire going again! At the very least, you will walk away encouraged by the knowledge that others also go through dry spells. Tune in!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s show, we talk to Rachel Rodgers, the CEO of Hello Seven. Previously, she was an intellectual property lawyer but today she is a business coach who helps women hit seven figures without sacrificing their home lives and sanity! Rachel works with entrepreneurs and helps them create and protect their own intellectual property to scale their business to $1million and beyond. She has worked with The New York Times bestselling authors, tech startups, coaches, consultants, doctors, accountants, nutritionists, and more.  In this episode, we talk not only about a healthy growth mentality and seven-figure mindset, but also about diversity, inclusion, and equity, and how deciding to have those as a priority in your business is smart and strategic. Rachel gives heaps of takeaways for listeners to implement in their businesses today, and suggests some resources for finding people to begin to expand your circle. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to the The Strategy Hour! We hope you’re as excited for today’s episode as we are because we have something special for your earbuds that we know you are going to love. Today we will be talking about email welcome sequences and how to do them right. It took us some time and few missteps to get our’s where it is today and we are happy to share all the blunders we made with you for you and your business’ benefit! We want to help you get your welcome sequence just right for your needs and most importantly to make it profitable, so buckle up! During this discussion we’ll be guiding you through our history with our email tools and ideas and showing all our listeners just what worked and what didn’t. And at the end of the chat we will be sharing something extra special that can take you one step further in your marketing so make sure to listen out for that. We cover the purpose and reasons for having a welcome sequence that is the bomb, we also do a deep dive on why our first welcome sequence was so bad! Imagine that! From there we share some of the reasons why it can be so difficult to get this right, especially in the beginning and we finish off by emphasizing what you should be focussing on when you are putting your sequence together. So let’s get all the way in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show, all you biz badasses, and money queens! Today we have a great episode in store for you that you are most definitely not going to want to miss! Our guest is Jereshia Hawk and she is here to tell us about how she switched from a big corporate job to selling her services online and increasing her salary in the process! Jereshia was working on huge, high-profile engineering projects when she left her job and during this first year of going solo, she managed to double her salary! Sound amazing? We think so! She has subsequently taught her strategies to hundreds of people online and helped them get going on their own road to success.  A lot of what Jereshia teaches is a little different to the majority of information that is available online. She has a focus on grassroots growth that we just love! It was such a pleasure to have her on the show and the conversation is motivating and really informative for anyone looking to get out of their day job and start their own little thing. This topic is really near and dear to our hearts as Abagail started out on her own, selling services when she quit her corporate job and so much of what Jereshia says rings true for us. For a great conversation with a massively inspiring person, be sure to get it all on The Strategy Hour! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show, Emylee and Abagail walk listeners through their October profit report and, as per usual, it is nothing short of wild! Before October kicked off, Abagail and Jared suddenly needed a bigger space and ended up purchasing a new home without even planning to. What’s more is it is a fixer-upper that needs quite a bit of work, and we don’t need to tell you what a time-suck buying and renovating can be. At the same time, Emylee was away for a week on a much-needed break, and things got crazy and chaotic very quickly, but they managed to pull it together and still make a great profit in the end. Amidst it all, they planned for a big launch in November and ran their first sale on the Creative Template Shop’s annual membership, all of which they discuss in this episode. They also had to establish whether a monthly or annual membership would be more profitable in the long term, so they did an experiment to see whether they could switch over to just an annual membership but realized that the slower conversion rate was not going to cut it just yet. Tuning in, listeners will find out how they managed to increase their memberships while reducing the one-off purchases in the Shop, and where all the other revenue came from in October. Of course, they also share the details on what they had to spend to keep things moving along smoothly and treat themselves appropriately. Be sure to tune in for all of it, and more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we are talking with Elizabeth McCravy. She is a Nashville-based website designer and business strategist. She designs strategic and fun website templates for female entrepreneurs. Today we are focusing on her journey utilizing Dubsado to grow her business to six figures plus. We are going to be looking behind the scenes at what features she loves most about Dubsado, what order of importance she recommends for you to set up using Dubsado’s features, to get stuff off your plate so you can focus on clients and actually scale.  Elizabeth says she was only able to scale to six figures because of Dubsado, so if scaling and clients are in your future, Dubsado is going to be for you. We also do a little sneak peek on how Elizabeth has set up Dubsado to use for her podcasts guests’ inquiries. She also answers the question of what feature Dubsado should have if it could only have one! We hope this one is an eye-opener for you as far as different strategies to implement in Dubsado in your client-based business, podcast, guest blogs, or anything related to getting people interested in working with you. Let’s get those workflows set up! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we are going to talk a bit about reorganization and what it looks like to really get clear on the roles and responsibilities of your team members inside your business. We will talk about how you might do this as a way to clean up and get your head straight before you go through a hiring process. We have probably made every mistake in the book when it comes to hiring and have learned a lot over the last few years as we have expanded our team. We have come from every end of the spectrum when it comes to hiring a team – having a big team, a small team, no team, contractors, and everything in between! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest, Alyssa Bloom, has spent the last 10 years working for one of the biggest companies in the world, being a manager for virtual teams. She manages over 120 people and has an incredible background in management and people leadership. In this episode, we are talking about creating a sense of ownership in your community and culture in your business. We have always been open about our struggles as leaders of our internal teams. We have had challenges with motivation, delegation, and just making sure that our staff is happy and that they like what they are doing.  It has been something we have wanted to get better at ever since we hired our first VA. So, having someone we love and respect so much help us get organized and in shape was crucial, and we are sharing that process with you today, along with how you can replicate it. There are so many good takeaways that Alyssa shares. We hear how to get more organized, make good hires, and most importantly, how to create a sense of ownership within your team and have your staff be as happy as they can be.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking about batching your shiz! Yeah, girl! We know it’s a sexy topic going into the holiday season, but even in general, people want to get as much done in as small a window as possible so they can focus on the thing that they started their business to do. A lot of people find marketing monotonous, which we get, and we have been making it not only easier for you but also more fun with the Creative Template Shop.  Another great way you can wrap up the end of the year is by batching a bunch of content so you can serve your clients, finish projects, ship out orders, get things listed, have fun in the holidays with your family, and renovate the new house you just bought too! So, to do this and to make it fun, we decided to bring back the challenge concept, and today’s show is all about our newest one – The 4-Day Batch Blitz! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest on the show today is Abbey Ashley, the founder of The Virtual Savvy! After running her own successful VA business for a few years, she has gone on to help other aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. We get to pick her brain today, and the reason we’re so excited is that she has an amazing business philosophy which involves keeping things simple while still making a major impact! She has perfected the art of doubling down on the areas that work and remaining laser-focused on those rather than getting distracted.  In this episode, you’ll learn about her launch game plans as well as how she deals with Black Fridays, teaching us how to set ourselves up for a booming year ahead. You’ll be thrilled to know that Abbey will also be a speaker at our upcoming Boss Project Summit, another great reason to sign up and get your pass! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We remember our first good sales experiences so well! It can be one of the best feelings in the world and it does not have to have that slimy and sleazy feeling to it at all. Today we are talking about what we are actually doing and the process for having more efficient, successful sales meetings, that just feel better. No one wants to feel icky and coercive when they are pitching and the truth is you really do not have to! What you really need to learn how to do is to let people fall in love with your offer, so it is less about selling and more about showcasing your process. If you follow these simple pointers the actual sales pitch will be a home run, we promise! We have spoken at length recently on the podcast about locating your ideal and appropriate clients and this episode is essentially what to do once you have found them. Bad experiences in this department can make you feel terrible so we are trying to steer as far clear from these as possible. You do not want to be word-vomiting your way through nervous, un-researched meetings. These can leave you feeling like a wreck and with no more money to your name! Let's rather get strategic and get selling!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us on the show today is returning guest Ward Sandler, the co-founder and CEO of MemberSpace. Ward runs a SaaS company that enables entrepreneurs and organizations to turn any part of their website into members only with just a few clicks. But we are not talking only about MemberSpace in this conversation but a new way to integrate an amazing community to your membership or products using a tool called Circle. While Circle isn’t affiliated with MemberSpace, they work together perfectly — which we love! Ward breaks down the features of Circle and how you can add-on a community to make a great experience for your members and customers.  We did an episode on Patreon and Mighty Networks a while ago (Episode 468), and this is yet another option for those who want to move their community away from social media platforms such as Facebook groups. Ward gives his take on Patreon and Mighty Networks, explaining how the pricing and features differ from MemberSpace and Circle and why he is a huge fan of picking the best tools for every need and then making them fit together seamlessly. Listeners will also get plenty of advice for setting up MemberSpace and Circle and learn how it can transform their membership engagement. Be sure to try it and check it out at bossproject.com/memberspace! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re excited to talk about business in September and the fact that we’ve been in business for five whole years! Honestly, it now feels like we were babies when we started this whole thing because looking back at old blog posts and videos we created in the early days – you can tell that a lot has changed. We have really aged – but we think in the way that fine wine does. Abagail used to have a perfectly smooth forehead when she got botox to alleviate her migraines, but now she embraces her age and is happy to have a few extra lines. It comes with the territory! Emylee, on the other hand, loves her potions and creams and whatever it takes to bring out her youthful side.  But in this episode, we talk about how our business has aged (along with us) and how we have found our groove, shifting from a do-er to a be-er mentality and enjoying much more calm than chaos. We share what we got up to in September, focusing on the live launch we did for Strategy Academy and how we have adjusted our approach to ads for the better. Tuning in, you will also hear us talk about the appropriate amount of planning, the strategy we implemented to make the next few months easy, and all our profit and expense numbers for September. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Prepare yourselves for one of the best episodes! Why? Because we are interviewing two of our favorite people, Jake and Becca Berg, the founders of Dubsado. Not only have they done amazing things for us in our business but they have helped many other service-based babes get a grip on things. We love watching them continue to grow over the last five years and admire them for building a software service while also leading one of the best customer service teams out there, making a huge impact on small business owners. They are now five years in and have expanded to 45 employees!   In today’s episode, we are touching on some of those unique aspects that make Dubsado tick and pick their brains about what they are doing that we can all apply to our businesses. Jake and Becca share the lessons they have learned as a SaaS company, how their business has evolved and changed in 2020, and how they have kept customer service a priority throughout. Be sure to tune in for a super fun interview! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today’s episode, we are going to bring back an oldie but a goodie — We are going to do a Boss Talk episode, where we just ask a question, riff on it, and see where it leads us. That's totally our style anyway; we love to riff on things. No-one is surprised that we go on tangents and talk about whatever we want, whenever we want. The question for today is, how do you cope with stress and still remain productive when you have got all this stuff going on? We both run two businesses, so there is a lot on our plates! Also, we are in the middle of a pandemic, heading into a new season, Emylee has a kid who is bouncing off the walls, and Abagail just bought a house that needs renovations!  So, as you can hear, there is hardly anything going on at all (sarcasm much?). The question around productivity is one we hear super often, and Emylee finds she always gets it in her DMs when she has shared an especially productive day. People want to know how she manages to sleep, much less do it all. So, just to clear the air, she wants to let everyone know that she is not a workaholic, and it’s actually something she actively puts effort into not being. It's so easy in today’s world to just work all the time, especially for her personality type. So, she wants to share some of the expectations she has for herself, and how she and Abagail have stayed productive in the midst of it all. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Tiffany Tolliver, the owner of the Emma Rose Agency. Tiffany is a rebrand and relaunch strategist who specializes in income-generating web design for service-based womenpreneurs. While she stays in her lane with graphic and web design, her mission is rooted in creating income-generating services, helping her clients get $300,000-launches. We talk about how she is able to create this high-end experience using our favorite Dubsado, getting into the features of Dubsado she relies on to land high-paying clients. Tuning in for this episode, listeners will learn more about the frustration that led up to Tiffany getting Dubsado, what is has changed in her business, and how she incorporates the platform in every step of her client onboarding process. She also talks about what optimizing your systems can mean for your stress levels and business, why you shouldn’t shy away from making such investments, and about being realistic in your expectations of an ROI. Tiffany walks us through her approach to sales calls, why she believes face-to-face engagements are crucial for landing high-paying clients, and wraps up the interview by giving other strategies for taking a client from interested to sold out! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We know our listeners are super smart, and there are tons of cool things you do every day, so maybe the best thing you can do today is to outline your group course! We have been in the teaching space for a while now, and Boss Project has recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. Go us! Interestingly, even though we have taught tons of people over the years, we haven’t shared that much about what we put out into the world. We teach a lot about business and marketing, but we have not really gone into course development that much. This is mostly because this is not everyone’s primary job.  We have, however, noticed an influx of coaches, and the majority of the people in the Creative Template Shop are actually coaches. While this is surprising, it is also really incredible because people are increasingly looking for connection and transformation, and they want someone to guide them in that process. Before we get started, we want to invite you to a party. All you need to do is open the Strategy Hour Podcast up in your favorite podcast app, give us five-star reviews only, and then share these screenshots on Instagram. You can win one of two great prizes, either a free copy of Trello for Business or a whole month free of the Creative Template Shop. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on The Strategy Hour we are joined by the amazing, the wonderful, the gifted, Melissa McGraw! Melissa is the founder of The Creative Potential, an agency dedicated to helping online business owners increase their traffic and revenue through improved SEO. She and the company have aided countless brands to grow their audience by millions and applying her strategies can multiply your organic search results tenfold in just a few months! With Melissa's help, we are going to be breaking down SEO in the most simple of ways, not getting too nerdy but also not skimping on great, actionable plans and ideas. We want to get you ranked on Google ASAP! Get your notebook ready so we can start getting more traffic and customers and have that reflect in your bank account! It's been a while since we have talked about SEO and just as a reminder, it is very important for all, and we mean all, businesses! If we are honest, SEO is still a foreign language for some of us, while some of us have kind of got the hang of it. Our goal today is to get your site search engine friendly and high up in the rankings! We will be going from the simplest questions about what SEO is and how it functions, how to utilize it for your biz, and even touching on some of the higher-end stuff that will get you to the top of the first page! These strategies are super accomplishable but it is also worth noting that you are able to hire someone like Melissa to help you out with this task, get an expert to do the work for you, so there is that option too! Now, let's get you found online! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you want to increase your sales? Of course, you do, we all do! There are so many strategies out there on how to do this and today we are picking out four that we use and that have been highly effective for us! We hope that sharing this with you will help you to decide which strategies are best for you and your hustle. When we speak about our work we are referring to Boss Project, our main thing, and then each of our own side gigs. Some of the strategies have worked better in different places but we will be unpacking all of that, do not worry! The cool thing is that you get to try these out for yourself and see which suits you. We want you to think about which fits with your goals and lifestyle, as well as its conversion efficacy. These are the most important metrics for you to keep an eye on while testing things out. Don't forget to keep the conversation going over on Instagram, you know we love to hear from you, so hit us up with any thoughts or questions! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of us can do with a little help with the tax and accounting side of our businesses and we have just the person to talk us through the important parts of this process! Back on the show is our friend Braden Drake, who runs Braden Drake Law, where he works with a handful of one on one clients to sort out their tax and legal issues. His mission is to help as many people get as much of their business on the right track and running smoothly! He believes strongly in treating yourself like the CEO you need to be and in this episode, he covers exactly what this looks like. Spoiler alert! Braden has just finished writing a book that is about to be published! It is called Unf*ck Your Biz and details the service that Braden provides for his clients.  Braden does an amazing job of unpacking the framework of the book for us and shares the initial steps in tackling the biggest and most common mistakes he comes across. He talks about the 'oh shit cycle' that business owners get into with their taxes, how to know you are in this, and how to go about getting out! Braden shares many of our biz philosophies, striving to help you become profitable, paying yourself, and paying your taxes. We know tax can sound a bit boring but Braden is amazing at making it fun and lighthearted, so make sure to stay tuned as we get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can you believe it’s already time for another profit report? Literally, before we hopped on to record this show we were like what happened last month, what month was even last month? We couldn’t have told you! There has been a lot going on, and it’s not so much business – it’s like, life is crazy right now and we are keeping it together but hanging on by a thread. It’s a lot! But August went so well despite what typically happens, which is sometimes a hot mess. And we definitely want to get into all the data around that, but one thing we did, as most of you would have, was throw out our 2020 plan. We didn’t even have one and just have been taking every month at a time. We expected we would have a dip in August, and then when we got on here, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Rachel Proctor, an author, speaker, and second-generation entrepreneur who helps people turn ideas into successful online businesses. She is a self-proclaimed market research junkie, she’s hit seven figures, and she knows what she’s doing, having built a versatile and trusted learning resource hub for aspiring and successful business owners. In this episode, we get into Rachel’s belief and strategy that there is no better time to start a business than right now, even in a crazy 2020, even with less time – now is still the opportune moment! She explains why she believes that and dishes out tangible steps to figure out what to offer, how to find out what you’re good at, how to find people to pay you, perfect your process, grow, and everything in between. So, for those of you who had an idea and dropped it once the pandemic hit or are just ready to take the leap but don’t know where to start, tune in to learn more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are y’all ready to start hearing Jingle Bells? Well, you need to prepare yourself cause the holiday season is fast approaching even though it felt like we all lived in a time warp this year. Usually, we are not great with planning far in advance, but this year, while the weather is still warm, we thought we would jump ahead and create a holiday master marketing game plan. Q4 has this weird way of flying by in the blink of an eye, so we want to share with you some of our top strategies to make the most of the festive season. Because, while the world is in recovery mode and things uncertain, we know that people are still spending their dollar bills, and the predictions suggest that people will spend more money online this year than they ever have. Whether you are in products, services, coaching, or something else, people are spending their cash on the internet, so let’s capitalize on that and see how we can leverage this fact this coming season. While we do not know what exactly you will be offering these holidays, we can help you work backward (from the end of December to where we are currently) to give you a pretty clear idea of what you need to work on and when. So, fill up your cup and be ready to take down notes, cause this is going to be a goodie! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the show today, we have brand designer Colin Tierney joining us. He owns and runs Tierney Studio where he has grown his branding and started a whole new business before the pandemic hit, which we will get into today. Talking to Colin, we give you another perspective on a Dubsado customer’s experience and how they have used the software and CRM to perfect their client process, land deals faster, offload projects, and more.  As a fellow designer, Abagail wishes she knew about Dubsado when she was still in the design business since their software takes the client management side of things off your hands to free you up for doing the design work. There are just too many benefits of signing up for Dubsado, as you will hear from Emylee, Abagail, and Colin. If you’ve had questions about the capabilities of Dubsado or have thought about getting started with the platform, this episode will give you a really good peek behind the curtain. Remember, as a listener of the podcast, you can also get Dubsado for 30% off your first month or year! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Emylee and Abagail get into the topic of building a community that you get paid to run, talking about two of the more popular options in the creator space – Patreon and Mighty Networks. We see musicians, comedians, artists, podcasters, and the like use these platforms to create a network. As you all know, Emylee is always looking toward the next thing and has taken the leap to start her online community for those interested in building clay earring businesses, so she has done some research, signed up (and canceled) subscriptions, and figured out the details so that you don’t have to! We know that you love your Facebook group, but there are serious limitations to it, such as that you can’t get paid for it. However, migrating from one platform to another can be a nasty business since humans are creatures of habit who often resist new paths. You’ve got to have pretty solid reasons for wanting to migrate, and Emylee and Abagail break it all down for you in this episode. Before you get started on a paid community, be sure to tune in for this episode!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we are joined by our wonderful friend and all-round badass, Sarah Peck. Sarah is the founder of Startup Pregnant, a New York City-based company dedicated to documenting women’s leadership. She is a writer, yoga teacher, and hosts Startup Pregnant’s weekly podcast too! Her goal is to amplify women’s voices and promote their business through her work and she definitely has one of our favorite brains in the game! We share a lot of her business philosophy and will be using this episode to geek out on some strategies for listening to your audience as a way to help grow your product or service. This super under-utilized and somewhat simple strategy can help you and your biz so much! By paying closer attention to your audience, you can really improve what you offer and make the direct connection between those paying you and what you provide for them. Quite a straightforward equation, right? This is the second time Sarah is joining us on the Strategy Hour and if you haven’t heard her previous appearance go back and check it out immediately, it’s Episode 185! This episode’s topic was sparked by a conversation a few days prior where we were chatting to Sarah about business philosophies and implementation of these. We really believe in these ideas and they are so in line with our core values that we could not resist having her on to talk all about it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on The Strategy Hour we’re diving deeper into what exactly we mean when we say that is should be easy and fun to make $100k from your service-based business, within a year. There’s a misconception that money cannot be earned without really hard work, and to an extent, this is true, especially for certain types of businesses. But you also have to be smart about it! Just to reiterate, when we say it’s easy to make six figures, we are talking about offering services like copywriting, designing, and photography. And this is by doing the basic work only, aside from all the other side offerings like podcasts and training courses.  In fact, you should keep it as simple as possible, focusing on doing one thing really well instead of doing a bunch of different things. These other ideas are not bad, but until you’ve done the one thing properly, you won’t enjoy its full benefits. We’re also guilty of this and we’ve seen many of our mentees battling with the same thing. Today we’re breaking this down in a way that we hope will help you not to fall into the trap of believing that diversifying will necessarily expand your business and make you more money. Whether you’re thinking of adding on products or offering more services, you think that the single solid service you’re offering will not get you to your financial goals. Today we’re busting that myth, and we’re going to show you have it is totally possible to achieve your goals by sticking to the basics. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we talk to our good friend Steph Crowder, a business strategist, sales expert, and host of the Courage & Clarity podcast. In her past life, Steph was a director of sales training over at Groupon but now helps entrepreneurs get more customers easily by working with those they already know. Today she is spilling all the beans from her extensive experience in sales, talking about how you can go from crickets to customers by following a three-step formula all about the problem, platform, and people, and we just share hacks from what we have learned here at Boss Project and in our side businesses. Switch on your strategic thinking, and tune in!  Remember to leave a five-star rating and review of the show wherever you listen to your podcasts and share it on Instagram, tagging us! When you do this, you stand a chance to win one of two awesome prizes: a free copy of Trello for Business or a month’s access to the Creative Template Shop. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s get into our July 2020 profit report! This year has just been super satisfying. Around fall last year we had decided and declared out loud to you that we were on this mission to get to 30% reoccurring profit each month, and at the time it felt like climbing a mountain. We were just really struggling and had spent all this time and money trying to figure out who makes up our team, what our products are, and how we are selling them, but something about this year just really clicked for us! We started sharing our profit reports last fall with this goal to hold ourselves accountable. We know you guys like to hear behind the scenes. We also restructured how we did our profit reports. We don’t do it like how a lot of others do it where we don’t share our actual numbers – not that we don’t want to, but we honestly think they are distracting and put you in a space of ‘comparisonitis’, and no-one needs to suffer from that. So we wanted to showcase more of the percentages, breakdowns of our expenses, our profits, and just big picture decisions that we make every month in order to reach our goals. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we say that today’s episode is going to rock your world, we’re not even joking! If you have a client-based business and use Dusado, maybe you have wanted to set up workflows, but been so overwhelmed that you haven’t started, then stop what you're doing and listen to this show with a notebook because Krystal Clark literally breaks every step down! From lead capture to onboarding to delivering to offboarding, she leaves no stone unturned. Krystal even goes so far as to give us five hacks on how she’s using Dubsado differently than what we have heard before!  Krystal's creative brain takes something that already exists in Dusado and then reworks it to be custom for her clients and you guys. If you do not have Dubsado yet, you can get 50% off for the first year by going to the link at the end of the page. It will rock your world when it comes to infusing beautiful brand and designing the workflow process. A lot of what Krystal talks about, we either have a template that will make it simpler or she gave us new ideas for templates that you best believe are coming out. Please share the workflow that you’re going to get set up because you were inspired by this episode, tag us, and then be sure to also tag Krystal on Instagram.   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been a hot minute since we had this conversation and we think we have some fresh takes on this taboo topic that seems to happen in every single niche, every single industry, and that is the conversation about pricing! We have so many thoughts and ideas around this and think there are a lot of very strong opinions about what you should and should not do and so we just want to put a disclaimer at the top of the whole episode to say, “You do whatever you want, and that’s okay!” Nevertheless, we want to have this conversation again because we both have our own businesses on the side of Boss Project.  Abagail will share how pricing impacts her marketing and clients, some complexities about pricing, and how she has felt differently about this topic over the years. For Emylee, the maker community is rampant with conversations about pricing, but she believes the questions being asked are often actually about something different to pricing. So, Emylee will pick apart what this means for her, and talk about the different conversations that actually need to be had! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are talking to JB and Brittany Jacquot, who own their own media company out of San Francisco where they do video and photography for brands, influencers, and high-end weddings. Like so many people our age, they jumped on TikTok at the beginning of quarantine. This has translated into over 100 000 followers and a booked wedding in less than 24 hours! So, you best believe they got some hot tips for us. They break down every single thing they have learned about the platform — How to make the perfect viral video, how to get people to sign up for a freebie or opt-in, and how to get people to follow you or other channels. They also share actual numbers and stats so that you have a better understanding of the kinds of expectations you should set for yourself when you are growing your own or your business’s TikTok following, and you are trying to monetize it.  They talk really candidly about how they broke down and thought about who they want to target, what they wanted to share, and how they wanted to get people to move over to different channels so they could actually use it to make money, rather than gaining followers for the sake of having followers. We know you will get a lot of ideas on how to utilize this for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and even video content in general. It's a really great one, and we can’t wait to see what you all come up with on TikTok after this! Before we get started, you’ve been invited to a podcast party. Find us on your favorite podcast platform, leave a five-star review, head over to Instagram, and tag us. You will then be entered into a draw, where you stand the chance to win one of two prizes — A free copy of Trello for Business, or a whole month of The Creative Template Shop for free! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we get into exciting topics like email marketing, conversions, texting, relationships, and more! We talk about what we get up to in Boss Project (our main gig) and our side hustles, cause have accumulated some valuable experience over the years. Emylee sells handmade accessories (physical products) and hosts her website on Shopify, and every month she learns more and more about e-commerce and all things product-based. Abagail started her wellness company after going through a serious car accident, and as she journeyed to improve her health, people wanted to join her. She used her story to build a group coaching program called Jumpstart where she helps women lose weight and focus on their health. She is also a leader in the Young Living network marketing business. While it can be overwhelming to run different businesses, we find that it triggers different parts of the brain and keeps things fresh! As we grow, we realize how important automation is and why we should leverage key tools to make things more streamlined in all of our businesses. Stay tuned to hear about our most trusted apps and tools! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome to another fantastic episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast! Today we are joined by one of our favorite people in the world, a real internet bestie and the Instagram King, Tyler J. McCall! Tyler is here to talk to us about his specialty, how to get Instagram working for you immediately. Of course, Instagram, like all social platforms is constantly evolving so Tyler will be talking about what the best strategies are right now, but also looking at some of the more timeless rules of the framework. Tyler has helped a huge amount of entrepreneurs (including us!) to grow their Instagram following and engagement through the lessons he teaches. For Tyler, it really is quite simple: if you follow a few easy rules, have fun, and bring your own personality to your account you really can’t go wrong! During our conversation, we cover some of the basics around content and captions and the move away from highly curated profiles. Tyler also stresses the importance of knowledge of your audience and how this informs your strategy. We get into the nitty-gritty of telling your brand’s story and how to convey this in an effective and engaging way as well as looking at the values that underscore everything that you post. One of the biggest recent developments on Instagram is obviously the Stories feature and Tyler breaks down some lessons for approaching that area and also reiterates just how important they are to your reach, engagement, and potential profits. Lastly, we cover some tips and ideas for personal versus business profiles and how to go about starting out on the platform for newbies. Jump in, it’s going to be a fun ride! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you unsure of what you are doing or where you are going? We know the feeling! Here at Think Creative Collective, we want to talk about these things with you! On this episode of The Strategy Hour we are talking about the crippling effects of fear and anxiety. We are here to tell you that everyone feels these things at different times and you need to be kind to yourself when these scary feelings come around! It is the unknowingness and feeling unsure that make it so unbearable most of the time. But if we can talk about and acknowledge what is going on maybe we can make some progress and take a little more control of our lives. Come on sister, we know you got this! Emylee feels that she has an unhealthy fixation on the amount of time she has left before she dies, something that can become overwhelming and paralyzing. This can stop her from achieving the exact goal that these fears arise out of, wanting to be impactful and do great things. She feels like she is not sure what to do next and how to go about getting over these hurdles. Abagail on the other hand finds that she is stuck more in the present than on the future. She ends up settling for the dissatisfaction and inaction of not having any more to give and just wants to put her feet up and do nothing. We are sure all our listeners have all their own worries and concerns that affect them in different ways and we really feel for all of you and hope that this episode can be the beginning of some important conversations towards better managing these issues.  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 'Gram is a topic near and dear to our hearts, and it’s one we know every entrepreneur who we cross paths with thinks about on a daily basis. For most of the people that we know, it’s their happy place — that’s definitely the case for us! Today's guest does things differently on this incredible platform. Natasha Samuel, Founder of Sol Studio Marketing, is not simply posting stories or putting things on her feed. Of course, she is still doing these important things intentionally, but she has some other tricks up her sleeve that most people probably have not thought about when it comes to their Instagram account, so you definitely want to stick around to hear what she has to say. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We received a DM the other day all about how amazing our profit reports have been for people but it was also somewhat of a review. So, we just want to remind people that they can review this podcast and be a part of our podcast party (tune in to find out how!). But back to our DM about our profit report and how helpful it was for this woman in her business, and how these reports continue to feel like an inside peek into the actual workings of our behind the scenes. At the end of the day, the dollars are not what matters. We want you to see profit – more income in your business. Revenue is fancy. Revenue feels sexy. Revenue does not give you the lifestyle you want though. If you’re not keeping any of that revenue, then it is irrelevant. So we want to help you keep more revenue, that is making more profit so you can increase how much you’re getting paid and also just save for crazy times! So today, we are excited to talk about our June 2020 profit report. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are so excited to have this conversation, mostly because one of our favorite things in the world is to either learn, do something, or unlock a strategy, and then, in two seconds, turn around and start talking about it! We don’t like to let things fester for too long and want our listeners to take a peek behind the curtain as quickly as possible! Some of you might have seen on Emily’s personal Instagram (@emilysays) or our stories @bossproject, that Emily just did a rebrand! It’s so different in an amazing kind of way!  Part of why Abagail loves it is because for the first time in forever, she didn’t do it herself, so it turned out nothing like it would if she had done it. It’s modern, woo, and earthy! For the first time in forever, Emylee was the client, so today, she gives some behind the scenes insights into how her rebranding process went. She talks about how long it took, what she did herself as far as preparation, the relationship she had with her amazing designer, and a whole lot more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You guys will enjoy our guest just as much as we do, and to share the love, why not leave us a glowing review and join the party over on Instagram? When you’ve told us just how much you love the podcast and given it a five-star rating, take a screenshot and post it on Instagram – and remember to tag us. When you follow these easy steps, you stand a chance to win one of two awesome prizes: a copy of Trello for Business or a month free membership on the Creative Template Shop!  Our guest today, Lattice Hudson, is a born and raised Chicago girl who has earned a degree in human resources. She has spent considerable time in corporate America working in human resources before she took the leap of starting her own business, which comprises online coaching and mentoring. In a short period, she managed to grow her business exponentially, and today we talk to her about the power of good, authentic conversations to boost your business. If you are a service-based entrepreneur, you can double down on serving your clients well, but we will show you how it can work in the product space too. She shares strategies for having impactful conversations on Facebook and in your DMs and building relationships on a solid foundation from day one. Check it out! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Jamie King, the owner of Flex and Flow PDX (originally Fit Approach) joining us! Together with her cousin/business partner, she has built a successful online fitness community, but that’s not what we are talking about today. Nope, we discuss company culture, how to establish it based on who you are as a human being, integrating it into your business, and how you can maintain it even when you have a virtual team. We also talk about the evolution of our company culture and what our business values are. We have often alluded to company culture in our conversations, but since it is something that seems abstract and that isn’t necessarily featured on the everyday to-do-list, we tend to easily forget about it. For a long time, we let our company culture be what it was and watched the evolution of it over the years, but now we are trying to give it more direction. We aim to cultivate a relaxed, easy-going culture that promotes independence and functions on a trust basis. But company culture does not happen overnight either; it develops when you show up consistently over time. At the same time, company culture is in everything you do: every social media post, every graphic, every email you send out—so be mindful about it. We have such a great conversation with Jamie today, so be sure to listen in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show, we have Becca and Jake Berg of Dubsado. We are super excited to have them on. They are a husband and wife team that are the brains, power, and geniuses behind Dubsado, which is a client management system for creatives. They have built one amazing and beautiful platform for all of those things that you have 75 different logins for, including your contracts, how you get paid, and how you respond back to clients after they book with you. All of those pieces are neatly tied up in one amazing software bow.  In today’s episode, you are going to get a peek behind the curtain. We are walking you through the steps they took to build the software company, from idea to launch, and doing all of this amongst building a family and having full-time jobs. They share with us how they have been able to grow and scale their business, and how Becca had to make sure it was her own. They also dive into exactly how they were able to make this awesome idea into an actual product, get it launched, and then how they have been able to scale and grow their team. We are even talking about some inside scoops on how to better perfect your client-based business and get paid faster. So we are excited for you to jump in, listen, and learn! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, we are thrilled to bring you this episode with our good friend Shunta Grant! You might remember our Episode 441 that was all about tiny offers and why they might not be for everyone. Well, our guest today is the founder of the Best Today Brand and Guide and more recently the Right Now Routine, which is the bombshell tiny offer she developed. The way she is marketing this pocket product (with cool gamification aspects!) is just next level, so we talk about that and how we swiped the idea for our own marketing for the Creative Template Shop. We also get into how creating a low-priced offer was right for her in her business at this moment and what kind of groundwork she had to do before she could even begin creating it. She shares how leaning into something that is fun, simple, and feels good produces miraculous results and how you can implement it in your marketing strategies. Be sure to give this episode a listen: you will not only love it but also walk away more inspired and much better equipped!  Ps. Remember to join our virtual party! All you need to do is leave a rating and review on our podcast and go share it on Instagram. You then stand a chance to win either free access to our popular Trello for Business course or a free month to the Creative Template Shop! Do. It. Now! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you heard about the virtual party we are having at the moment? One that you are all invited to? It is super easy to get in on the fun! All you need to do is leave a rating and review on our podcast and go share it on Instagram. You then stand a chance to win an awesome prize: either free access to our popular Trello for Business course or a free month to the Creative Template Shop!  Today we are talking about launching various types of business, sharing a bit about what we are doing with the Creative Template Shop, and what the different avenues of our business entail. We sell courses, run a membership, sell products, and run a coaching business, so between all of that, things can get intense! We are always curious about the behind-the-scenes of a launch and what people are having success with, but the truth is, there are no guarantees. There is no perfect equation. At some point, you just have to jump. What is more important is taking an approach that you feel aligned with and excited about because your enthusiasm and confidence is what will win people over. In this episode, we break down a few strategies that we have used in our various businesses to help us grow—the kind of intel you do not want to miss out on! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is all about the required step that you need to take in order to successfully sell what you do. That's right we are giving you the tools to really beat your imposter syndrome and beat it well! For the last couple of weeks we have been speaking a lot about where you clients are and how to find them, this is a big internal piece and it means getting over a big hairy monster! We also suffer and have suffered from this issue, so do not fear, this is the way to crack the code and move forward. We know you are doing this so no need to hide in the reeds! We see you convincing yourself that if your work gets better you will get more clients and that the reason you are not currently getting more clients is because of the quality of your work. It is easy to start thinking you should work for free or very cheaply and get into the churn of lowering your value, so that one day the glory gates will miraculously open and you will have arrived.  You know this is not the world we live in! It is not like your portfolio does not have any say in your client base but so many potential clients out there are less concerned with your portfolio than you. Customers are not in your field and do not have as discerning an eye as you do, they are more interested in the experience you are selling. So we are hear to tell you to stop selling yourself purely on what you have already done and how good you think you are, not everyone knows good from bad as well as you do! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to hear about the biggest change we have made to our business in a LONG time? If you have been with us for a while, you will know all about our email marketing journey. It’s been truly huge for our company and an integral part of our growth and the foundation for our global reach. We have been with many email marketing providers over time for a variety of reasons. If you want to hear about why we migrated between the different platforms, like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Infusionsoft, and ActiveCampaign, dive into our archives because we have documented all of these moves. We believe that regardless of the size of your business, email should be easy, and dare we say, pretty? All of the platforms we have used have their pros and cons, but for us, we want it to be as simple as logging in, writing an email, having it look good without knowing anything about code, and being able to send it to the right people at the right time. A lot of people, especially in the creative industry, can get carried away by pretty things, and we are guilty of it too, and it does drive a lot of our decision-making. That does not mean we do not value functionality as well. So, today we are going to share more about the new email platform we have found that merges our love of beautiful things with a fantastic backend user experience.   If you’re listening to this episode, we sure hope you’ve joined the podcast party. It’s super easy, and you can win things. It's as simple as going to your podcast app, searching for the Strategy Hour Podcast, and leaving us a glowing review about all of the amazing things you love about us and the podcast. Then, screenshot the review, what episode you’re listening to, where you are in the world, and what you are doing. Share this all on social. When you do this, you are automatically entered into a once a month giveaway — and you can do choose your adventure. You can pick between our most popular program, Trello for Business, or you get a free month to our most popular membership, The Creative Template Shop. You are only eligible for prizes if you share, so best get those thumbs moving if you want to get your hands on a fantastic freebie! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest is Josh Coats, #1 best-selling author of F*** Leadership, a leaders’ guide for every network marketer so that they can get out of their heads and lead better. With a background in life coaching, Josh teaches masterminds and coaching programs. While the conversation is centered around network marketing, the message is much broader than that. Josh is into marketing made simple — Easy, fun, simple marketing that works. So, we go over the three categories that he walks through within his business when sales might be slow or he reaches a plateau or there’s something that’s just not driving. These three areas are his go-to's to see what could be done better. Josh gives us some strategy examples in these three categories, so you can simply copy and paste them into your business.   Along with this, we also dive into freemiums and how to convert without feeling like you’re selling all the time, while also still feeling like you’re engaging in a way that doesn’t take all your time, but creates really good results. This episode is packed to the brim with ideas, so you might need to stop and pause and back up. We get down to such a granular level, that at times this feels like a one-on-one coaching session. Be sure to tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we get into today’s strategy, we want to tell you about our podcast party because there are awesome prizes up for grabs! Simply head over to your podcast app, find our show, and leave a five-star rating and review. Take a screenshot of your review, post it in your Instagram stories, and remember to tag us @bossproject so we can see and share it on our stories too. If you do that, you can win one of two amazing prizes, either our Trello for Business course or a month free to the Creative Template Shop, and we pick a new winner every month! The more times you share, the bigger chance you stand, so what are you waiting for?  In this episode, we talk about launching. We recently posted a fill-in-the-blank about how the idea of doing a launch made you feel, and you guys made us laugh! You came up with such funny descriptions ranging from super excitement to wanting to jump off a cliff—and we totally feel ya! The majority of you expressed some degree of anxiety, though. And we get is, because for so long, launching felt like this burden that put so much pressure on who we were and how our business was performing, it never used to feel good to us either. Fortunately, that’s changed a lot over the years and today we’re sharing how you can adjust your mindset about launching, so that it becomes a fun and profitable thing to do. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are going to be talking about the 23 launch mistakes that your business can’t afford to make. But before we get started, first and foremost, we want to encourage you to get into the mindset of treating every single thing in your business like a launch. Whether that’s an Instagram post, a blog post, creating a course, new brand colors – treat it like a launch. Because if you do not treat it like a launch, it becomes one of those things that sits in your to-do list and doesn’t get done! As soon as you treat it like a launch, you will take the steps you need to in order to make it happen.  We have gone through the process of launching an obscene amount of times, and we have helped so many others do the same. Through these experiences have noticed a pattern of common mistakes made throughout the launch process, and today we want to share the top 23 mistakes we see happening in a launch. From aiming for perfection, to poor planning and promotion, or just not reaching out for support. There are small (and big) things we can do to maximize any launch and keep our sanity in the process! We believe in you and If you’re thinking about launching, you are in the process of launching, or you are just wondering how you can improve on your next launch – this episode is an absolute must! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, friends! Today we are super excited to bring you another Boss Project profit report. As you may know, we love sharing all of the behind-the-scenes data about what worked, what didn’t work, and how everything got split up within May of this year. In this episode, you’ll get a little peek behind the curtain of our business, comparing last year to this year, and asking the hard questions for you to consider in your own business.  Before we dive in, we want to know: are you joining our podcast party? Because if you haven’t yet, now is the time! It is super easy to be a part of it. All you have to do is make sure that you are subscribed to the podcast, take a screenshot of the show, and share it over on your social to be entered to win our monthly contest. Plus, make sure to leave a rating and review! As part of the perks of winning, you get to choose your prize: either a free copy of Trello for Business or one month free to the Creative Template Shop. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have this theory that you can make less revenue and walk away with more money in your pocket if you do a few very strategic things. Like many of you, we came to a point in our business where we were ready to see big growth—and we don’t mean make a little bit more money, but exponentially more! Who doesn’t want that, right? And we managed to do that. In the first six months, we made $100,000, doubled it four months later, and we went on to have a multiple six-figure business in our second year, and over $500,000 the year after that. We just kept going after bigger dreams and pursuing more. But we believe there are some things you can do to help you along, and it doesn’t include focusing on that top-line number—which you can shoot yourself in the foot with. We know people who look like they are super successful online, but when you dig a little deeper, you would discover that they had set themselves up in such a way that they get to keep very little of the money they make. We were headed in this same direction. In this episode, we talk about this learning curve we experienced in 2018 and 2019 during which we thought we needed to do XYZ when we didn’t! Besides, what’s the point of reaching your big goals when you are not personally making any more money? Stay tuned to find out. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Lindsay Hotmire. She loves to work with female creatives, entrepreneurs, and CEOs to help them discover a non-formulaic version of authenticity. She’s helped over 200 clients and counting ditch the one-size-fits-all formulas and frameworks and helps them genuinely align with their message. In this episode with Lindsay, we break down what being authentic actually means and how to be authentic in a way that feels good for you and with your audience.  We talk a lot about business values, your core values as a person, and how to not only identify them but then use the results in marketing, branding, messaging, and in your overall strategy to grow your business and sell your product, offer, or service. There are so many examples that we talk about today, everything from messaging and Instagram presence to how you build community; so many different ideas! It’s a really good one and we hope you love it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tiny offers … what are they? Small, inexpensive products that are supposed to blow up your business. At least that’s what we think people are saying they do: start with a tiny offer, grow your audience exponentially, and make a ton of money. Those people suggest that it’s possible to create a six-figure business on the back of a $29 product; that you can launch with a tiny offer and make the big bucks. But hear us out: while we have a tiny offer (Trello for Business), this only came much later in our business—we didn’t start with it.  We made a tiny offer before tiny offers were a thing, and now people ask us about it all the time since it became the cool thing to do. This is what we’re talking about in this episode. We’re walking you through whether or not a tiny offer makes sense for your business right now. The pros, the cons, the whole shebang. But take note that these are just our opinions and experiences; you might not agree with them. Still, there is always something new to learn. Grab your go-to Strategy Hour drink and let’s go! To read the show notes of this episode, head to: thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we have serial entrepreneur and business coach Christine McAlister back on the show! She is an amazing friend of ours. We love having her on the show and we hope you get some really good nuggets from today. Christine has a unique skill where she gets people to say yes to pretty much anything she puts out there, including coming back on our show all the time! What she is teaching you today is how to pitch yourself and how to be an amazing guest on other peoples’ podcasts, and why this strategy – being interviewed for other peoples’ shows – is one she recommends over actually having your own show.  She is going to walk you through how to use it to network, how to leverage, how to grow your audience and increase sales, and it’s just an all-round good, honest conversation about to-dos and not to-dos! So get out your notebook, jot some of the amazing strategies shared in this episode down, and we cannot wait to see what episodes you land your booty on! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we’re excited to do the profit report for April because we don’t know about y’all, but for us, April felt much better than March. When the pandemic first escalated in the US mid-March, everyone was freaking out and didn’t know what to expect. But when April swung by, people got more accustomed to the changes and things started coming into a rhythm again. Businesses were pivoting and finding ways to keep at least a portion of their income steady. We decided to lean into what was already working—to focus on what was performing well naturally. We could easily have tried new things but instead, we kept focused on growing the shop rather than pushing our $2000 signature program—which would have been a hard sell in the context of an uncertain economy.  In contrast, the Creative Template Shop is a $47 commitment that helps people with their marketing, which they desperately need now to stay afloat. But for us to approach the crisis with the focus and energy that we are, we needed to make some good choices early on. We avoided mindlessly consuming media and thought carefully about how we were spending our time and who we were surrounding ourselves with. Negativity was the order of the day but we just decided that we weren’t going to get sucked into it. This shift in headspace had a huge impact on our business because we spent less time worrying and poured more time into what was already working. In this episode, we once again tell it all—and we are thrilled with the results! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are so excited to have Brit Kolo joining us once again! She is the creator of the Marketing Personality Type Framework to be found at marketingpersonalities.com. Through her framework, Brit has designed a match up system that works to find the best marketing strategies built for you based on your Myers-Briggs personality test! You guys know we love personality tests, so it is not shocking that Brit is back on the show but today, there’s a twist!  In this episode, we are throwing out a lot of what we have been raised to believe in this online marketing world about finding your ideal avatar. Today, we explore how maybe the concept of an ideal avatar is actually not what we should be paying attention to at all! So, be sure to listen to this episode to find out what Brit thinks you should value more than your ideal client or avatar, and how you can best filter marketing strategies that feel comfortable, good, and fun, so you can be super effective! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As of this week, we are officially five months into the launching of the Creative Template Shop and it’s so exciting, still! There are so many different moving parts and really cool aspects behind the scenes that are going on with this product of ours, and what’s more, they have never been a part of the process for other products we have developed! So, we wanted to share an update with all of our people! We want to share some things we are thinking about developing – new features – and we want to hear from you too! So, we are officially opening our project to the public airwaves for your guys’ feedback and we are talking shop about the really cool things we think are so special about our baby. After today’s show, maybe our shop can become a nice little home for you on the internet as well! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show our guest is Danny Maloney, CEO of Tailwind, and we are so excited to have him here to talk about what his company has done for online business and how you can utilize it to drive more traffic and sales on your own! It’s important that you know that before we started using Tailwind we were using Pinterest. We had been on Pinterest for five years and had created a ton of content at that time.  Back in the day we hacked it so we could explode on that platform and we had a strategy that we shared all over the internet. We wrote a blog post about it, but then, we found Tailwind and were like, “What is this? This is a lifesaver!” So, we are really looking forward to chatting to Danny about the changing landscape of content ranking algorithms and how to increase traffic while driving sales on Instagram and Pinterest using Tailwind! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emylee recently decided to migrate from Squarespace to Shopify for her side hustle website, which got Abagail questioning hers too. She had some issues with Squarespace but she didn’t want to go through the hassle of moving from one platform to another. But since then, Squarespace has released its 7.1 version which is not quite an iteration because it is almost an entirely new platform. Some aspects have remained the same but mostly it is different.  Abagail has gone through the process of comparing 7.0 to 7.1, so, in this episode, she walks listeners through the differences so that, should they consider migrating to the updated version, they know what to expect. If you are still on the fence about whether you should opt for Squarespace or Shopify or want to learn about everything the new version of Squarespace offers, this episode is a must-listen—don’t decide before hearing us out!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are super excited to welcome Ward Sandler to the show! Ward is the co-founder and CEO of Memberspace, where he and his team help entrepreneurs and organizations to turn any part of their site into a members-only area! They make it so easy, anyone can do it! Our topic for today's conversation, however, is customer service and feedback loops and we were over the moon when Ward pitched this idea to us and we cannot wait to share it all with you. We get into all the helpful and authentic ways that you can keep in contact with your clients and customers, and Ward talks about the ways he does this every day, all week long! This kind of proximity to an audience is what has helped Memberspace grow and grow in such an exciting way. They have raving fans and Ward explains what has contributed to this. Spoiler alert, its the feedback loops and great service! These lessons can be applied to whatever kind of business you run, whether it is for services, courses or products, you do not have to be a software company for these strategies to be implementable. We really recommend that you check out Memberspace and give it a shot if you have been considering something like this! Without further ado, let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, guys, we finally stopped putting our things off and worked on some marketing strategies we told you we would test out to see what would happen, and they worked! We’re just a little disappointed at ourselves, but also proud at the same time! We knew they would work and so we’re really glad that we did them, even after putting them off for an obscene amount of time! We know everyone listening has their own version of, ‘I put this off,’ when it comes to a marketing strategy they have heard about that works.  So, today we’re talking about simple marketing strategies that we finally put into practice and proved! The only thing you need to do is spend some time setting these strategies up, putting some things in place to prepare, and then actually doing it! Listen along and hear some of the amazing marketing tricks we tested and proved to be a great success! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the Strategy Hour podcast we have Kat Harris joining us. She is a Brooklyn-based online educator, digital content creator, co-founder of The Refined Woman, and the host of The Refined Collective podcast. Kat is also a photographer who has spent the last decade working from home—so she can teach us a thing or two about getting working from home right! After so many years of experience, she had tons of advice and shares her strategies for organizing your schedule to serve you. Because, for Kat, your time and energy matters and you should be spending it exactly like you want to while still getting the job done.  She talks about how she has adjusted her schedule, mindset, and expectations during the crisis to strike the balance between growing and giving yourself a lot of grace. This episode is full of practical advice that everyone can implement on some level, according to your reality and set of priorities. Let’s jump in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have exciting news! Word on the street is that Emylee is trying something new—gasp! Because, as you may know, she isn’t stuck in her ways at all…But before she shares her news, we have to state upfront that Abagail is going to be fulfilling the role of devil’s advocate on today’s show, poking holes in Emylee’s gutsy decision to switch from Squarespace to Shopify. We’ve been using the former since 2014 and we’ve been incredibly loyal, building our entire business on this site. At one point we considered having the site customized because we thought we were getting too big for the platform, but we ended up proving that Squarespace really can work for large businesses. And we still love Squarespace!  But then Emylee started this whole product-based business venture and it’s been a learning experience par excellence: of course, it is completely different from running a service-based business like Boss Project. So, Emylee called Abagail a few days ago and let her in on the secret: she was rebuilding her website on a new platform—Shopify. Now she’s getting messages from friends saying, “Welcome to the club! You’re doing what every e-commerce person should be doing.” In this episode, Emylee is going to walk you through the reasons for her decision, the features she’s excited about and the ones she misses, who she thinks Squarespace is right for, and more. Be sure to listen in as the two of them hash it out! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we have Amanda Boleyn back on the show! She is the founder of She Did It Her Way, where she coaches women how to quit their jobs, replace their income, and build an online business they love. In this episode, we are talking about the four steps that she has developed that you can implement right now to start landing clients and offering your services! We know that considering current circumstances these steps might need to be expedited a little bit and they could feel a little hurried and rushed, but the point is they work so implementing them effectively could be just what you need. So, today we are giving you a lot of ideas on who you can be reaching out to, how you can figure out what to offer, and how to actually market and get your product or service sold!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For those of you who don’t already know Emylee – welcome to her anxious life. She is the type of person who can tell you where every exit in a building is, or how to stop drop and roll in case of a fire, and where to hide just in case a tornado suddenly appears on route to the mall. In business, Emylee is the kind of person that likes to go through every single worst case scenario. She always has a back up plan… and a backup plan for the backup plan. Emylee is the queen of doing this and it turns out that this can be a super helpful attribute to have in a business partnership.  This episode is about planning for the things that you can never plan for. It’s about answering those difficult “What if” questions. It’s about securing your business for the future and the reassurance that this brings to your life. For those of you who are single business owners, we’re not sure you’ve thought of planning for worst case scenarios and exactly how to do that. So in today’s episode, we’re going to be sharing our experiences and the reasons we have made planning for worst case scenarios an integral part of our overall business strategy. We discuss the various insurance options you have, the various questions you need to ask yourself and how you can effectively plan for the worst, in the best kind of way. Take a listen! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Courtney Chaal, the founder of The Rule Breaker’s Club where she teaches women to package and sell with brilliance and offers awesome products, and her work has been featured in Inc., Creative Live, and The Huffpost to name only a few. She is crazy-talented when it comes to messaging specifically, so this interview is right on time. We get that we shouldn’t necessarily be changing our offers or postpone our launches, but how do we talk differently about our services, so that it appeals to people at this moment?  What messaging do we need to tweak to make it relevant, and where is the balance between being empathetic and helpful versus making sales because we’ve got businesses to run? Courtney shares the top tips that she herself is implementing in her business, from getting your mindset right and brainstorming ideas, to asking your audience what they need and putting it all together in a project plan, so strap in and let’s dive in!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We dunno if y’all noticed, but March was weird. March was also hard, hurtful, and 7000 times longer than January. That’s probably because March asked us to adjust to the new normal and we were still getting used to being home—all the time. And we’re not here to pretend like our situations are better or worse than anybody else’s because, like you, neither of us knew what was going to go down in 2020. What we do know is that this period will be a watershed in small business, the impact of which will likely be felt years from now.  While we don’t know how this will pan out, we can give you our March profit report and roll it out into a Q1 report in general for you guys to see how the first three months of the year went for us. You can always DM us if there is anything you want to know that we didn’t cover—we’re all here to learn together, right? In this episode, we tell you how each of our products fared, including the surprises and the disappointments we had and how we overcame certain obstacles. One thing is certain: tuning in to this episode will encourage you because we show you how reaching your goals is still possible!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s show, we interview Melanie Fountain, a blog and Pinterest strategist who started her virtual assistant business a while ago and has since equipped herself in the area of all things Pinterest. We hopped on a call with her to chat about all the changes that 2020 brought to the business landscape, and we were so blown away by her knowledge that we asked her to record an episode of Strategy Hour with us. She talks about the behind-the-scenes strategies for getting your content discovered and seen by more people. Earlier this year, Pinterest underwent a shift toward different looking content but fortunately, it does not mean you have to go out and make a bunch of new content.  Melanie walks us through their adjusted policies and how you should adjust your approach, how Pinterest can work for product-based businesses, and what it means to be discoverable on the platform, including the ins and outs of hashtags, keywords, and descriptions. We adore Pinterest and have since its inception when it was all about planning dream weddings. In the early days, you saw more lifestyle content than business blogs, so using it for business purposes was still fairly new. But fast forward five years: we’ve been terrible at keeping up with Pinterest, but now they’ve done a major update that is very much applicable to your business. Stay tuned to learn everything about creating the strongest Pinterest profile in 2020! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Meg Clarke of Clapping Dog Media. She is an SEO strategist who teaches creative small business owners how to grow their organic traffic and rankings so they can make a great impact and reach more people. She is also a sourdough bread baking genius, so you can look forward to several bread references throughout this episode! In Episode 45, we interviewed Meg where she talked about SEO for newbies, but today we’re taking it a step further by addressing intermediate and advanced issues that are more applicable to listeners who are somewhat experienced in this area. A lot has changed since 2017, so she discusses updated SEO practices, stuff you can do to prep your business and brand for launch and what to do if you are pivoting and need to start tackling different topics on your existing website. She also dishes out resources for finding targeting keywords and hidden SEO within your website and shares what she reckons is worth spending time on. Before we get into the meat of the episode, it’s worth mentioning the incredible strides we have made with our SEO since a few years ago. But, while we’ve done well, we also desperately need maintenance. Our traffic used to be at a low 5 to 10% from Google despite our volume of content, but now over 50% of our traffic comes straight from search. But, as we said, we also need to brush up on our SEO, so we’re just as eager to hear what Meg’s got for us. So, pull your notebook closer and get ready for some fresh SEO strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It feels like it’s been 87 months since February, both in business and life, but we are going back in time to revisit that month and stay consistent with our profit reports. We’ve heard that these episodes are super helpful to you. For those who are unfamiliar with profit reports, we started them in August of 2019, sharing not income reports but profit reports, including the exact percentages of gains, losses, and so on. Our goal is to chase higher profit margins and we share what that looks like for us and the processes we go through to get there. These episodes give you a peek into our business, which will hopefully encourage and help you in setting up your strategies without any comparisons.  Today we talk about how we used the Five Days to Launch challenge to feed Strategy Academy, why we’re okay with Trello for Business breaking even, how The Creative Template Shop blew our socks off, and why we permitting you to pivot a little right now! Intending to double down on this learning experience, we will also be hosting a live workshop to practically guide you to implement the same things in your business. Stay tuned till the end to hear where to go to learn more about crunching the numbers! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Jessica Rasdall, a motivational speaker, bestselling author, public speaking strategist, and host to the Speak to Scale Podcast to talk to us about crafting your story for the virtual stage. Now that we are homebound and communicating with our audiences online, we can do with some help when it comes to showing up as ourselves and helping people rather than just have a self-serving online presence. You’ve heard the vulnerability piece – that you need to be relatable and reveal your “humanness” to your followers, but what is the right amount of sharing?  Jessica walks us through a formula for breaking your story down into three acts so that it is most helpful to people, a structure that outlines the before, middle, and after phases of your story. Each of these three phases is important: from hooking the audience and relating to their experiences to showing them how the significant event changed your life and the difficult decisions you have had to make. For Jessica, the most important aspect is the motivation behind sharing your story, and if its primary purpose is not to help your audience in some way, you might want to reconsider. Be sure to tune in to hear the rest! motivation behind sharing your story, and if its primary purpose is not to help your audience in some way, you might want to reconsider. Be sure to tune in to hear the rest! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to the show. This is going to be a really good episode because today we are finally talking about the Human Design personality test method. We have heard such muttering about this topic and we are obsessed with personality tests in general. It’s amazing how in this Human Design model, personality is seen as something baked into who you are. You don’t get to pick or adjust over time like in other test models. It’s literally based off of your birth hour/minute/location, so you cannot change what you are. We know very little about this topic but wanted to share what we have learned so far. Tests like the Enneagram and Myers–Briggs give you such good insight about who you are, and you can learn how to be a better person and understand your faults. The Human Design model, by contrast, can help people become more balanced through collaboration. Our conversation today is structured by running through the book Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born To Be, which helps breakdown how Human Design came about. We will talk about some of those basic principles today and how they relate to our types as business partners. Enjoy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back all of you lovely quarantined listeners! We are sending you some love and strength in these trying times! And in order to show you that we are having a chat with a special person today. Carrie Grace McQuaid is a former teacher who is now a full-time motivational speaker and spends most of her time traveling around the country spreading joy and kindness! Sound great? We think so! She talks to companies, colleges, sororities, schools and more about how they incorporate more joy and kindness into the workplace and their practices. The current crisis has put traveling on hold for a while, but Carrie is here specifically to help us unpack how you can share the love and offer help in these difficult times!  She has literally gone viral for her work in this area and we just wanted to bring her on to open up the conversation about feelings and thoughts and how to be kind, open up your capacity for others, take care of your mental space and what to focus on business-wise as we all hunker down for an unsure future. Everything is so unclear at the moment and a lot of things are up in the air, the economy, health, income and everything else! Carrie shares some great action steps for everyone but we would like to say that if you are currently feeling overwhelmed or have too much information on your plate, maybe save this for when you are feeling a bit more receptive. It is a great episode and deserves your attention, so best to make use of it in the right headspace! We really feel that what Carrie is offering can help us be the amazing community of amazing people that we can be, so let's get into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before diving into the show we wanted to let our listeners know the date on which this was recorded – March 18th – because we know the world is in a weird place right now. The strategies discussed here are hyper tailored to this moment and things could be totally different by the time you listen! In any case, from our side, we are trying to create a sense of normalcy in our business and within our friends, so we wanted to go ahead with our chat with Meghan Maydel.  The strategies our dear guest shares today are highly valuable due to their applicability not only in this time of pandemic and crisis but also to other spikes within the world and the industry of advertising in general that could happen in the future. Meghan talks about how advertising doesn’t just have to happen on Facebook and gives a whole bunch of pro tips about other platforms and what using them can look like for you. We will be brainstorming different ways for you to be really effective in your ads today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast, we figured that – in light of the current coronavirus restrictions – it might be a good idea to share some strategies for creating a super productive work environment at home. With a great deal of travel suspended, in-person events canceled, schools closed, and employees asked to go home, people around the globe are having to think about how they can remain productive out of the office.  Some of you might already be working from home, but for some, this might be a first-time experience and we want to help you master the most common challenges when living, working and parenting in the same space. With kids at home, parents are now confronted with the added challenge of having to look after their children while still maintaining work productivity. In this episode, we dish out strategies for getting your to-do-list crossed off, whether you are a business owner, parent, or both! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by our badass biz bestie, Shunta Grant! Shunta has released something amazing that we think so many people in our audience need and in fact a bunch have already started using and loving! It is called The Best Today™ Guide and it is all strategy and no fluff! We will be going over the ins and outs of the guide today, so you can get a sneak peek of what is inside and the strategy behind its creation.  Shunta is a great example of someone who has taken her business to the next level and is now letting her audience in on some of her wisdom. She is the mind behind Because of Zoe Designs and her new foray into online education promises to be just as successful as what has come before. So without further ado, let's hear what she has to say! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every single month we add thousands and thousands of people to our email list, which sounds bananas because when we started getting to the first 10,000 subscribers, it felt unbelievable. It was a lot! So, we want to give you guys a little bit of a vision of what it looks like to grow your email list at a rapid rate in today’s episode. Several of the concepts we are going to cover could be 100% organic. You do not have to utilize paid strategies at all.  Now, some of these things we definitely have put dollars behind, but some of the concepts without paid dollars are the same! There are more ways to grow your email list than you’re perhaps aware of, and we are going to cover our top five today! We might come up with a few others too though, and just throw them in! So tune in and join us for the ride as we get into the best ways that you can keep those subscribers on the up and up! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the tail end of January, there was a viral blog post that blew our minds, and since then we have been on the hunt to find others who are experiencing similar things. The post was about a guy who had a bad day because he found out that not everyone has an inner monologue, in other words, they do not talk to themselves. We’ve managed to track down a handful of people who swear that they do not have that internal voice happening at all. One of these people is Hannah Chester. Hannah never realized that there was such a thing as internal monologue until she was diagnosed with ADHD and listened to a podcast about it.  For her, her thoughts are more like a visualization rather than a conversation that takes place within. When she remembers something that needs to be done, she sees a mental picture of it — there is no inner voice that narrates the scenario to her. We invited Dr. Barbara Shabazz to give us a scientific perspective on internal monologue and how that ties into ADHD, and the four of us have a fascinating conversation about how differently each of us experiences and engages with the world. Join us to hear more about this internal monologue from those who do and those who don’t! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like most of the US population, we are currently obsessed with the new hit show on Netflix Love is Blind! Today we are picking apart why we think this has been a viral sensation that has hit our country, and most importantly, what takeaways there are for your business. It may seem odd that we are comparing a reality show about finding love to business but you will be surprised at the similarities – especially when you look beyond what happens in public view. And if you haven’t watched this show or aren’t caught up, you might want to wait before listening to this episode because there will be spoilers.  Love is Blind came out about two weeks ago but Emylee was late to the party since reality television is not her thing, but after watching the trailer, she was hooked! Let’s be honest though: reality shows are trashy more often than not, and some of us don’t even like admitting that we watch them – it’s a guilty pleasure for many. But they can be a rich source of learning life and business lessons. In this episode, we compare relationships to business and the principles that apply equally to both. Just as the dating stage is required to build trust between two people, so business owners need to find strategies to attract customers and then to establish themselves as trustworthy and relatable. We also talk about the importance of showing up as your true self rather than trying to be who you think others want you to be — all of which we relate to the choices of the contestants in our new favorite show. Let’s jump in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we have Tony Rulli, the co-founder, and CEO of Intentional Spark, an amazing paid advertising consultancy which we are proud to have the service of! He is the lead strategist for all their paid marketing campaigns which include Facebook ads, AdWords, web re-targeting, Instagram – the whole nine yards! As we said before, he is our ad guy, so Intentional Spark runs all the things behind-the-scenes for us which you, our listeners, see all the time!   In this episode, we are diving in and talking about a bit of the mechanics behind how these platforms function regarding sales and building an audience. We’re breaking down and picking Tony’s marketing brain all about the future of Facebook and Instagram, and what the next hot features are that everybody should be paying attention to. We also dabble into a little bit of conspiracy theories and a short clip of some of our favorite shows. So this is a really good smorgasbord but it’s all things nerding out about marketing and it should be really enjoyable. Tony also shares a freebie at the very end all about how you can start getting set up with your Pixel, and a little bit on how to read an ad report, so definitely make sure you’re listening till the end so you can grab that link! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends! We are back for another profit report. It is time to break down January’s profit, the first profit report of 2020, and we are super excited! If you’re new here and this is the first profit report that you’re listening to it might be a little bit different than what you’ve seen floating around online where people do ‘income reports’. We decided last fall to change up the narrative, not only for ourselves and our mentality when we’re talking about business and our own goals but also for the ‘comparisonitis’ that happens. Sometimes when you hear income reports where people list high figures and goals it gets really overwhelming and unattainable, and we can’t really compare that progress or those strategies to our business because we feel like the expectations are so different.  So, what we have tried to do is share percentages and profit. We have made it a goal to focus more on profit than big, shiny, sexy revenue, and that goal is continuing into 2020. It feels really good too! So, throughout this episode, we’re going to share percentages of products or expenses in our own business so you can begin to see the weight that those things bear on us, and can make easier comparisons with you own business too! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A relevant question recently popped up in our Facebook community, one we felt warranted some unpacking. The question came from someone who wanted to hear from others whose businesses were also passed the early stage and now in the season of awkward adolescence. You have made some sales and lined up loyal clients, but you still have higher goals and are eager to learn the next steps. Frankly, you need reliable strategies to get you past this almost-entrepreneur phase ASAP!  We’re in the unique position to offer our advice not only because Boss Project has mastered that stage but because our side hustles are now entering the teenage realm, so we are having to go through all of that again – at this moment. But rather than bumming us out, we’re excited about this challenge because it feels familiar now; we’ve been here before and therefore we have a good idea about navigating it. Tune in for advice about growing through the awkward teenager phase and running your business like a boss! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s probably not much of a long shot to assume that many people dream they could meet Oprah in real life. Indeed Abagail spent much of her youth watching the Oprah as soon as she was old enough. One thing she didn’t realize though was that in all Oprah’s years of her show, she focused so much on everyone else’s story that one rarely heard about her personal life. Oprah protected her personal life for a lot of reasons but Abagail had an opportunity to spend some time with her recently, which sounds unbelievable but it's true!  During her time with Oprah, Abagail learned some really interesting things about how the talk show legend approached habits and intentionality, and the role that these played in her huge success. The things Oprah taught Abagail lend huge insight both into her personal life and business, and are tips that anybody can take away and apply to themselves. Emylee hadn’t heard much about the trip yet so in this episode, Abagail walks her through some of the exercises around intentionality that Oprah did with her over the weekend to check how they resonate with her. The exercises gave Abagail some new perspectives on things she thought she had a good handle on so make sure you follow along for today’s show. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Life as a successful female entrepreneur can be frazzling with all the different responsibilities you have to take on. Sometimes it can be difficult to know which thing to tackle first! Today on the podcast we have Jessica Korthuis, founder of Sohuis, a marketing and branding education resources company that provides on-demand training for early-stage female entrepreneurs. Jessica is a powerhouse brand strategist marketer, and she has worked with brands like Red Bull, TEDxWomen, Girls Who Code, Stanford University, Bloomingdale’s, and Florida Institute of Technology.  In this episode, we are talking about all the differences between small business ownership and entrepreneurship. We cover marketing tips, feeling the need to do everything and be everywhere, and how to prioritize the stuff that is actually working in your business so that you can move forward. Joining this discussion, you’ll hear some top tips for validating your product, how to stop being a perfectionist and take action, and the value of being transparent to build audience trust. There is a lot of mindset-related stuff that we are tackling today! Jessica is really in tune with female founders, and the different way intuition works when running a business. So, if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed about what is on your plate and what you have to handle, perfect! This episode will definitely provide some clarity fo you. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oftentimes the people closest to us are the most apprehensive about our business goals and dreams, and this can be isolating. You worry that perhaps you have done the wrong thing as their lack of enthusiasm or support makes you doubt yourself. But have you ever considered that this might be because you going for your dream might remind them that they are stuck? Maybe their skepticism is more about them and how your aspirations make them feel – how it highlights their passivity or the rut they find themselves in. Conversely, it could be that your loved ones offer the wrong kind of support or they share their fears around your decisions because they do want you to succeed.  It could be that your spouse is more anxious than you are and that he or she is uncomfortable with you taking risks. As we all know, being an entrepreneur is all about insecurity and unpredictability! In this episode, we share our thoughts about why strangers are often more supportive than our loved ones. We talk about setting boundaries, not giving power to the wrong people, keeping a healthy perspective on the opinions of others, and why it is okay to unfollow people on social media! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Relationships can make all the difference in your business and as many of us have learned, focussing on connections and networking in the right way can take your biz from quiet to booming! Our guest today is Jaclyn Mellon and she helps experts exponentially grow their businesses by becoming an authority in their space. One of the ways that she helps them do this is through authentic relationships. Jaclyn is a coach, strategist, keynote speaker, momma, guac lover and host of the Go-to Gal Podcast! In this episode, she shares how to create strategic relationships and how to utilize them as more than friendships without being weird about it! For Jaclyn, it all starts with an authentic connection and she breaks down exactly what that looks like. We also talk about how this translates into creating more friends in your own space and work environment and how to utilize these to continue to grow your business in the long term. We cover leveraging relationships, creating intimate connections that fill your cup and how to jumpstart your biz in a big way! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Someone asked us the other day why it is we still work together after all these years and how we have managed to stay afloat as a business partnership. Most biz partnerships end before the five-year mark and it is crazy that we are approaching that milestone very soon! The truth is we do not really know the answer to the question, so we are taking this opportunity to talk it out and share what we think may have helped to keep us going!  Whether it comes down to balancing our friendship with our business goals or simply maturing together in our venture, we are here to lay it all out for you! We have had a few episodes of the podcast that have dealt with this subject in the past, so definitely go back and check those out if you have not listened to them already. There is something very special and magical about our partnership that is hard to explain in words, but we are still going to try! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Balanced Bombshells is a health and lifestyle brand for high performing women and we are very lucky to have the brains behind the business, Laura Charelle, as our guest today! Laura teaches women how to use their hormones to benefit their active and busy lives and she reminds us that hormones are way more than just your period, fertility and your mother's menopause problems! They impact our thoughts, energy levels and you know they can affect your waistline too! Today we are focussing on how your hormones affect your biz and Laura tells us about the increasingly popular idea of cycle syncing, something that has been coming up in our community more and more. It is all about understanding what your body is going through at different stages of your cycle, all month long and finding out which time is the best for different activities.  Better self-knowledge can lead to improved communication, relationships, productivity and help you achieve what you want out of your life! We recommend that you listen to this episode in full and then go back and take notes on a second listen, there is that much good stuff you do not want to miss! Laura gives us loads of information, free resources and enough to get you really inspired and motivated. We have always felt that we are not really qualified to talk about this topic but have been aware of its importance so we are really pumped to get to share all of this with you all! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For those of you that do not know, we used to work directly with clients, Emylee as a photographer, Abagail as a graphic designer and then as a branding and marketing company together! When you work clients in this way, selling packages and presenting offers there are strategic ways to do this that can improve your results and help you sell for higher price points.  This is where we started before diving fully into the online education space. In today's show we want to help you get better at this selling process and here's the good news, you don't even need a website to do it! Listen to this episode to get going, growing and making more money and make sure to listen to the end when we drop some info on two great tools we have set up for you and your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Friends! Let’s talk about email, opt-ins, lead magnets, freebies, and everything else you worry about in your efforts to grow your email list. While you can move a business forward without an email list, you will hit a point where your growth slows down quite drastically, so leveraging email as a platform to engage your audience and remind them about your awesome product or service is a smart move.  In this episode of Strategy Hour, we break down exactly what an opt-in is, the resources you need to set it up, and what kind of value they can bring to your business. We dish out opt-in ideas for a variety of business types and give you the best practices for introducing a new audience member to you, your business, and what you can offer to help solve their problems. Knowing the steps that newbies typically go through as they convert from an opt-in to buy-in is super important as it will help you to be intentional in designing the sequence that gets them there. We also tackle the common question of what to do with those who have opted-in but who are not purchasing anything and give you plenty of all-round great advice for optimizing your email. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may have wondered what kind of revenue our business made over the holiday season, so today’s we’re giving you all the details about December. So, even though we’re properly settled into 2020 by now, let’s just backtrack a little to the end of 2019 – because there’s still something we can learn there. During the past December, we took time off for family and enjoying the holidays, but we also prepared ourselves for a big launch in January. We recognized that making a big profit was not on the cards for this month as we had other plates spinning and purposefully decided to focus on our long-term vision.  Sometimes it’s okay not to have profit as your biggest priority each month because as your business evolves, different things are required at different times. Sometimes you have to do the groundwork for what is to come and sacrifice the quick short-term cash and listening to this episode, you will hear that this was what December looked like for us. Still, we talk about the outstanding performance of our Trello for Business course, why we expected a decline in profit from Strategy Academy, how we’ve rediscovered the power of strategic emails, and a whole lot more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are giving Emylee the guest chair and are diving into her newish side-hustle, making clay earrings! You have probably heard it mentioned on the show in the past couple of months since she started hand-making everything from home and selling it through her personal Instagram account. She has kept the whole thing quite fun and casual, not wanting to put too much pressure on the fledgling business.  In this episode, we talk about four major thoughts and ideas for growth in a product-based business and Emylee weighs in with her experience of each. The truth is her earring side-hustle might be a fully-blown business soon! So without further ado, let's hear what she has to say and get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Parker Stevenson is a great friend of ours and someone we love and respect a lot! He has done so much for us and our business in the years that we have been working together with Parker handling all of our bookkeeping. He has already been on the podcast a bunch of times and today he is back to talk about the all-important topic of launching! We get into cash-flowing a launch, how to know when you are ready or not ready, questions and preparation and how to pay yourself when it's all done. So basically we cover all the things you might be thinking about and what better person to ask than a bookkeeper. Parker is all about helping his clients remain profitable and this conversation will get you into a great headspace for possible launches in the future. We offer tons of free resources in the second half of the show so be sure to stick around for those and Parker gives the inside scoop on many business and how he has seen launches evolve. In his work, he has helped countless small businesses that apply to so much of our audience. So for all that and a whole more on getting your next launch off the ground and into the air, join us as we talk strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about our side hustles, the things we work on outside of Boss Project. Since we’re right back at the beginning stages with these projects, we thought it might be a good idea to share things as we implement and test them out. In this episode, we are going to dive into Abagail’s side hustle, sharing with listeners her processes, struggled and everything she’s learning.  She gives us the inside scoop on why she decided to take on this new endeavor, why she is personally invested in the health and wellness space, and what she hopes to offer other women who are in the same boat. Despite some people’s hesitancy about this type of business, Abagail shares how network marketing has been serving her well and then elaborates about the relevance of blogging, social media, email lists, Facebook ads, and other common strategies in her business. Finally, you will hear some great pointers for creating more consistency in your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Justine Nelson, founder of Debt Free Millennials. Justine is on a mission to advocate for a debt-free lifestyle, and today you will learn how this is relevant for your business and how it can fuel your personal financial goals. By the age of 25, Justine Nelson had paid off $35,000 in student loan debt making an average of $37,000 per year. Grit, discipline and a motivation to kick debt's ass for good helped her achieve this goal within two and a half years. In this episode, we talk about leveraging your side hustle to pay off debt or save for that dream vacation, Justine’s go-to worksheets and business books, and a list of things you can do each month to ensure that you stay on track with your goals. We also talk about bookkeeping systems, budgeting, planning for annual subscriptions, and setting measurable goals. Now that 2020 is in full swing, why not tune in to this episode and learn how to get your debt and savings dealt with? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we get to talk about one of our favorite things — meetings! While most people hate them, we are going to share a few things that might change your mind. Meetings are notorious for consuming a lot of time, often with little real progress, but we will present you with an outline that will make your every meeting from here on out a super productive, efficient one. We’ve spoken about the book Traction many times, but we want to remind you once more to go read it because this is where this outline and our guidelines around meetings come from.  Sometimes a meeting is not necessary and a Slack message or quick update will suffice, but other times having a meeting makes sense, and therefore it’s important to know how to approach them. Having a weekly meeting keeps all parties fully informed on decisions that were made, as it can be easy to think that everybody is in the loop when they’re not. If you are someone who has little patience for inefficiency and is always looking for the quickest, most productive ways to communicate and do things, this outline is perfect for you! This is as applicable to small teams as it is big ones, and don’t hesitate to ask your contractor to attend these meetings. Be sure to tune in to this episode to get the best strategy for efficient meetings!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our very first episode of 2020! As we all know, ’tis the season to set new goals, make resolutions, and ditch those nasty habits that were holding us back in 2019. We’ve already seen a whole range of resolutions from all of you; everything from what you want to learn, what you want to get better at, and what you want to let go of in the new year. Within those, we’ve seen one similar theme that constantly pops up, and that is removing or scaling down on social media, specifically Facebook and Instagram.  So, in today’s episode want to dive into our relationship with social media and offer some reframes that will be truly helpful in redefining this relationship, especially as it pertains to your business. As with all trends, there are always highs and lows and the conversation we are seeing nowadays is painting social media in a bad light. So instead of being bogged down by all that is bad about social media, we want to give you the tools to refocus on your business needs. Stay tuned as we go through our top tips to help you get a head start on your resolutions for 2020! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spoiler alert! This whole episode is a giant spoiler alert because you are finding out something before it launches – and we are stoked! We are seven days out from doing the biggest thing since our signature program came out. We hope for your sake that you’re listening to this after the launch so you don’t have to wait seven whole days for it. And we can tell you, we’ve been working on this project for more than a year, and we were pretty sure it would be a huge surprise to all of you, so we wanted it perfectly polished.  We’ve given it tons of thought and came up with the solutions for all your design worries. If you’re not a graphic designer and are always fretting over getting your branding right and looking professional, don’t worry, the dark days are over. Tune into this episode for the big reveal that will be a game-changer for your business in 2020! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today our guest is Jennifer Turner, the founder of Gemini where she helps online business owners improve their copywriting and design to create higher conversion rates. Gemini is an online branding and education platform and Jennifer is the rare combination of a trained copywriter and designer! Their MO is unifying a business' voice in the copy and design to tell a stronger story. We love it! Today we will be focussing solely on the copy side of things and how to get your up to scratch!  We are super excited for Jennifer to dive into her four-step formula for high converting copy and it is honestly one of the best formulas we have found in a long time! These kinds of frameworks can sometimes put you in a box or make you sound a bit robotic and this one is a really cool way to insert your story and your audience's story while coming up with something that gets your conversion rate all the way up! This can be used for freebies, opt-ins or paid services and programs, it can be applied in those areas just as effectively, that's how versatile it is, so get your notes ready and let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can you believe it? The year 2019 is over and we’re starting 2020 in just a few hours! We’re talking about our New Year’s Eve plans and how Emylee is going to navigate a house full of party people – thanks to marrying a frat guy who has a million friends! But speaking about plans to enter the new year on a high note, today we share with you our biggest lessons from 2019 and how they should impact your (and our) strategies for 2020. Tricky situations are unavoidable, and we offer you some solid advice for mitigating their potentially negative effects.  As business owners, we are required to keep learning and developing all the time – otherwise, we simply won’t be able to keep up and we’d never reach our full potential. There are logistics and technicalities that you must deal with at some point, whether it’s your thing or not because entrepreneurs and business owners need to fulfill a multitude of roles and responsibilities. We reckon that you can give yourself a pat on the back for what you have achieved in your business this year. It’s not easy, and it takes a lot of grit. Join us for this last episode of 2019 to hear more about break-even points, short-term sacrifices, distractions, and a whole lot more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are joined by the wonderful, the amazing, the multi-talented, Jessica Eley. If you do not already know Jessica, well you should! She is a mindset coach for high-achievers and has helped loads of business owners improve their practices and reach for the stars. She goes deep, wide and everywhere in-between with them and today we will be talking about the two different types of people there are in this world; be-ers and do-ers! Jessica unpacks who figuring out which of these types you are can make such a difference to the way you approach life and business. She explains the pros and cons of each and how striving for more balance can serve you so well moving forward. We talk about the types of tools and strategies that work for each and we give great examples of how these play out. Jessica is definitely more of a be-er, while Emylee is definitely a do-er, the conversation has a natural contrasting dynamic, which you will definitely appreciate. Join us as we dive deep with Jessica! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the November profit report! Businesses all experience ups and downs – we do too – and sometimes what at first seems like a minor thing turns out to have a big impact on profitability. You all know by now that we’re all about profit here at Boss Project and we’ve spent too much time focused on the top line that we missed many of the intricacies going on in the background of our business. We’ve been showing you how to stabilize your profit and our own goal is to get to that 30% mark, but we also understand that there are many moving parts – things that are beyond our control – that ultimately determine your profit. For starters, it’s imperative for you to know exactly what comes in and goes out of your business every single month and to be truly aware: you can’t fix something if you didn’t know it was broken! Three factors impacted us negatively in November, two of them were actually preventable, but now we know and we won’t make those same mistakes again.  When we talk about being aware, you have to know that your awareness not only drives your decision-making, but it makes you alter your focus on the flip side. It’s not necessarily that you need to decrease your costs, but it’s about looking carefully at what the root problem is. Something might even seem like an issue when it really isn’t. That’s why you never make decisions on a whim: decisions should be made after digging deeper to find the underlying problem. When you have this kind of information, you might look at your results differently. Join us again today as we take you through the highs and lows of November 2019! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today our guest is Claire Diaz-Ortiz! Claire is an author, renowned speaker, and startup investor. She was an early employee at Twitter and has taken that essential expertise into her work as a consultant and authority on social media and online branding. Her books have been published in 12 countries, won many awards and she has been featured widely in both print and broadcast media! Today we are referring specifically to her latest book, Social Media Success for Every Brand and unpacking some of the lessons she has compiled in its pages.  When we say that Claire is a social media genius we really mean it! In our conversation, we unpack the difference between direct marketing and brand marketing and why you should not be targeting an immediate sale on social media platforms. Claire breaks down a few common mistakes made by brands and big businesses on the various social sites that we all use and shares some very easy and quick strategies you can start implementing today to get things going! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s that time of the year again — we’re sharing our favorite words for 2020 and how they relate to your business! This past year, Abagail’s word has been “react”. She worked hard at learning to process her emotions in healthier ways and to not overreact to situations, trying to find that delicate balance between allowing yourself to feel the feelings but also not letting them guide your decision-making.  Emylee, on the other hand, wanted to approach this year with “ease”, knowing that she had many changes ahead, such as moving house and figuring out childcare. What she learned in the process was that she needed to make a decision that worked for her at that moment instead of trying to make long-term, “forever” decisions for every little thing. In this episode, we share our new words for 2020, and they’re good! Why not choose a word of your own (and share it with us over on Instagram) to guide you through the year; a word that summarizes the mindset you would like to adopt and take into the new year? Be sure to join our conversation to learn the whats, whys, and hows! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast our guest is Claire Pelletreau, a Facebook add and conversion optimization expert. Her genius involves brainstorming, strategizing, training and overseeing aspects of add spend for her clients – but that’s not what we’re picking her brain for today. We hear her take on what it means to show up in your business and focus on things that increase profits. We also talk about the nagging sense that you’re not growing as you ought to in your business and those things that lead to self-sabotage. If you’ve ever suffered from imposter syndrome, this episode offers you loads of questions and points of consideration that will help you to move past those gnarly mindsets. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So Emylee has been following a new Instagram account and just wanted to share some of the amazing data that she has been geeking out over for the last while! We have selected four specific posts that she found thought-provoking and worth talking about and will be unpacking what they are about and what we can learn from them. The Account is called Chartr Daily and they post charts and graphs that represent interesting statistics and facts from the business world. They often add some commentary and discussion in the description, as well as having a newsletter with more detailed information.  Here at the Strategy Hour, we love looking at charts! They might be slightly more difficult to make but that does not mean we cannot appreciate and enjoy what they are communicating! The four charts we have selected to discuss in today's episode are especially applicable to us, our industry and the conversations we have been having on this podcast, so head over have a look at the posts and let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Strategy Hour Podcast today, we are joined by the wonderful and amazing Rachel Green! She is one of the first people we connected with when we were starting out in the online business world and she has been in business for the last seven years, helping hundreds of businesses grow and succeed. As a brand strategist, designer and educator, Rachel has generated over 5 million dollars in sales for her clients and her focus on empowering female business owners is truly inspiring! In this episode, we are breaking down what a brand strategy is, why it is important to start there and the questions that you need to ask when figuring this all out. Rachel offers some great thoughts to work through in order to help you make sure your story and brand are pushing you forward. She is all about progression, not just pretty branding and logos! We really respect Rachel's perspective on the strategic part of branding and we know you will all find it very useful. So buckle up and let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the creative entrepreneur world, there are so many talents and you guys are doing great! But the one thing we’re seeing, and we’ve done the same thing, is that design work sometimes falls a little short. You might be a photographer, fine artist or wedding planner but do not necessarily have to expertise when it comes to your branding — that’s a set of skills entirely on its own. It could be an email header, a social media announcement or an infographic you need to whip up, and it’s not as easy as it looks. Graphic designers are trained to know what works and have a sharp eye to identify off-balance designs, but we regular folk don’t have that same skill.  So, today Emylee gets to direct questions at the Abagail who, as you all know, is a kick-ass designer. Wearing her designer hat, she will advise you about representing your brand in the most professional manner even though you lack professional skills. As much as we focus on teaching you guys about increasing profit, the way you show your brand to the world can be a make or break aspect. The bottom line is this: when you use the same styles, colors and fonts consistently, you become recognized as a brand, and that is your goal. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on the Strategy Hour, we welcome a great friend of ours. Alexis Teichmiller is here on the show for the first time, which is kind of weird and surprising! We have known each other for over 3 years and we are super happy to have her, finally! Alexis is currently in Texas, although Illinois is definitely her home, and she works at ConvertKit where she creates, explores and inspires entrepreneurs through her position as the manager of ConvertKit's affiliate program. She loves building relationships with influential creators and got in the game as an online entrepreneur and blogger herself! So she knows the game and its frustrations. She wants to help bloggers find the right fit at ConvertKit and how they can be more human in communication and branding! In this episode, Alexis gives us some great tangible action steps! The script she offers can easily be used to do what she does and we guarantee you will see some great results! We can all improve our communication with all those who are close to us; this means partners, friends, family and those we work with. Alexis also shares two amazing tactics that ConvertKit has adopted as a company which is a bit scary but pretty revolutionary! There are a bunch of cool takeaways for your business, as well as some book and podcast recommendations that we know y'all are going to love! We are so excited to be talking about the human element to business and how you can show up as vulnerable, relatable, real and strong all at the same time! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ya’ll now that we’re on a mission to turn you into a full-time creative entrepreneur who earns a sustainable income from your passion. Because we’ve been on this journey ourselves for the past four years and have helped thousands of people through it, we have seen and heard most if not all of the mistakes in the book. While we’ve spoken a great deal about getting your perfectionist or overachieving mindset right, that alone won’t help you to succeed. On a practical level, you need to stop making crucial mistakes, including focusing too heavily on the appearance of your brand, thinking that your audience is a bunch of strangers and convincing yourself that gadgets and systems will get you to where you want to be. Today we unpack each of these common mistakes, so get your notebook and listen up! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on The Strategy Hour we are so happy to be joined by our friend Jill Stanton! Jill is the co-founder of Screw the 9 to 5, where she helps ambitious entrepreneurs quit their day jobs and live out their business dreams. They also have a very popular podcast and through all this work has inspired tens of thousands of people to build thriving businesses and live lives full of meaning and purpose. You can see why we love Jill! This is such a fun conversation, in which we focus on what it means to hire for growth instead of filling spaces. There is a big difference between building a team that actually helps you make more money and just getting bigger. It is such an opportune time to talk to Jill about this as she and her husband have just implemented these changes themselves within the last year! So the results are not all in yet, but it is looking good so far. No matter how big or small your business is, this episode has lessons for you, many of which can be implemented from day one in order to set yourself up for success. As many of you will have noticed we are getting into the habit of emphasizing profit above all else and this is something we have in common with Jill! We are just so excited to have someone with this much experience in the online business world to share their genius with you. We have so much respect for Jill and Screw the 9 to 5, she has learned so many lessons and we can all be really grateful that she is here to share these us! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s time for another profit report! These are not an excuse to talk about our business – we truly want to arm you with helpful information that you can apply to your business as a full-time creative entrepreneur. Ups and downs are a natural part of any business, so we want to give you a glimpse into our month-to-month profit not so that you might compare your business to ours, but learn from our mistakes and find your own rhythm. We aim for a 30% profit and share what all our expenses are each month and the different sources of income over that period. Today you’ll learn what profit means to us, how our summit sales performed, why you must get hooked up with sponsors, the ins and outs of payment plans, and more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us for Strategy Hour today is networking ninja, Cassandra Thompson, who helps businesses extend their network through LinkedIn! But before you think that LinkedIn is only for professional or corporate folks and therefore not applicable to creative entrepreneurs like us, think again. Illustrators, jewelry designers, and service-based providers can all benefit greatly from a LinkedIn presence, and in this episode, Cassandra gives us the step-by-step of setting up a profile, an explanation of how exactly it works and she shares loads of strategies for getting the absolute maximum out of this platform.  We have to be honest, we too neglected LinkedIn because we thought that it wasn’t really a space for creatives to connect, but after a debate with Cassandra, we have done a 180 — and we’re pretty sure you will too after listening to what she has to say. Be sure to stay tuned in until the end because we are going to give you a 30-day LinkedIn challenge that we’d love for you to participate in!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We cannot believe we are about to enter into a new decade! It's crazy but it's true, so get ready! This is a bit of an unplanned episode, which is what makes it special. We want to take this chance to share our planning around the new year with all of you, and exactly what we are thinking about accomplishing for our business in 2020.  This chat will be the build-up to our end of year meetings around wrapping up and looking ahead. Just think of it as an unofficial look inside our minds as we close out another year at Boss Project and The Strategy Hour! So many businesses do not make it past the fifth year and we do not aim to add to this statistic! So feel free to drop in and eavesdrop on a typical meeting between us as we voice our thoughts and ideas going into the last part of 2019! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest on the show today is Abbey Ashley, the founder of The Virtual Savvy! After running her own successful VA business for a few years, she has gone on to help other aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. We get to pick her brain today, and the reason we’re so excited is that she has an amazing business philosophy which involves keeping things simple while still making a major impact! She has perfected the art of doubling down on the areas that work and remaining laser-focused on those rather than getting distracted.  In this episode, you’ll learn about her launch game plans as well as how she deals with Black Fridays, teaching us how to set ourselves up for a booming year ahead. You’ll be thrilled to know that Abbey will also be a speaker at our upcoming Boss Project Summit, another great reason to sign up and get your pass! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you want to increase your sales? Of course, you do, we all do! There are so many strategies out there on how to do this and today we are picking out four that we use and that have been highly effective for us! We hope that sharing this with you will help you to decide which strategies are best for you and your hustle. When we speak about our work we are referring to Boss Project, our main thing and then each of our own side gigs. Some of the strategies have worked better in different places but we will be unpacking all of that, do not worry! The cool thing is that you get to try these out for yourself and see which suits you. We want you to think about which fits with your goals and lifestyle, as well as its conversion efficacy. These are the most important metrics for you to keep an eye on while testing things out. Don't forget to keep the conversation going over on Instagram, you know we love to hear from you, so hit us up with any thoughts or questions! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show all you lovely listeners! Today we have a great guest who we cannot wait to share with you. Taylor Slango is an online business coach who helps women looking to grow their empire without compromising the things that are important to them! Her focus is on helping clients align their energy and strategy, in order to have more fun, make more money and ultimately make more sales! She started her business just one year ago and has since scaled to six figures and managed to leave her 9 to 5 in under 12 months. Impressive, right? This path is exactly what we will be talking about today! We are sure you all have a million questions around this transition. What it looks like, what to watch out for, how to know you're ready, the mindset to aim for and so on. Do not fear, we cover it all! We think the fact that Taylor is so fresh into this journey herself makes this an amazing opportunity to get her perspective! Taylor will also be at our upcoming summit, which we hope all of you have your free tickets for and if you do not yet, go get them! Her presentation is titled, 'How to Plan Your Next Sold Out Launch Without Stress, Overwhelm or Burnout'. This fits perfectly into today's conversation and we think you all need to hear it, so join us as we dive in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our whole mission is to help you transform your passion into a full-time business that provides you with a sustainable income, while also giving you the freedom to make your own rules. But becoming a creative entrepreneur comes with its own obstacles, and today we talk about the three-level model that we use to help our audience better understand business and where they are at in the process. The first tier of the model has you stuck in the idea phase, which often involves redesigning your brand, changing your website and trying to get all the cosmetic aspects perfect. The problem is, however, that you never move on to the implementation stage.  When you are on the second level, you have started implementing your ideas and have made a few sales, but here you might also get trapped. There is a temptation to try several ideas at once and you come up with many tools and programs to help you grow. But the truth is, if you want to get to that third level, you need to simplify by choosing to focus on only one or two things, and then to carefully measure their results. Remember to sign up for our upcoming webinar at https://bossproject.com/dreamjob where you’ll learn a whole lot more, including our business philosophy, the most common mistakes creative entrepreneurs are making and how to get past yourself!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are so lucky to host Joelle Elizabeth on the show! Joelle is a boudoir photographer and marketing strategist for other ambitious photographers and she is here to talk about growing a following and creating engagement on Instagram!  Remember when we almost deleted out Instagram account? Well, Joelle was one of the amazing people who reached out to us and offered some great alternative ideas and so we are eternally thankful to Joelle for the great value she has provided to us! Join us today as we get into how to double down on what you have going on and boost your status on the 'gram to get that business pumping! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re sharing with you our profit report for September. This is such a great opportunity for us to reflect on our business while also giving you a sneak-peak into how this might be applicable to yours. And before you think this is going to be boring – it’s not a traditional income report and we’re not giving you every single figure because it leads to a lot of unnecessary comparisons, disrupting the possibility of learning something.  In this episode, we’re going to go over what worked and what didn’t, where the money came in from and how it left, and what profit was left right at the end. Comparing September’s report with the previous month’s will also be helpful in understanding the unpredictable nature of business and will be a good starting point for getting some new strategies in place. Be sure to check in for another business masterclass! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have our first roundtable discussion of sorts! We are joined by Parker Stevenson of Evolved Finance and Amy Northard of Amy Northard CPA! Both of our guests are people that we work with and they are here to tell us about their experiences scaling service-based business scaling service-based businesses. Parker is our resident bookkeeping and financial guru and Amy is our tax accountant and so much more! Now you might be thinking that these topics might not make for the most interesting episode but we promise this is going to be super fun and not at all dull! Both our guests spoke at our recent summit about growing a team and productizing a service growing team, productizing your service and we wanted to pick their brains just a little bit more on the subject! So they are here to give you some suggestions on realistic scaling and how they have found it possible to move things upward in their service-based businesses. So if you love client work but also want to keep growing and cannot quite imagine how it might all work, this is the episode for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Strategy Hour, everybody! Today’s show is all about our upcoming summit! Yup, it is our fourth summit, can you believe it? This time out we are focused on helping you make the most of the end of the year and soaring into the new year like a rockstar! It is going to be so awesome and we can hardly contain our excitement about it! There is so much potential for the last part of the year and we probably do not need to tell you that Q4 is a really big one for small business owners. Our summit is going to set you up to tie a big, beautiful bow around 2019 and kickstart the new year on the right foot with the best energy. It can also be used as a great way to take stock and move into the next phase based on the lessons available. We wanted to bring you a complete package that offers a selection of things you need for now, the end of the year and the new year too! These time-sensitive strategies and ideas will cover Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the holiday season, planning, questions and setting goals. We want to help you commit to the right things and give you the right stuff to implement in your business for the better. Join us as we give a preview of what to expect! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are super glad to welcome business and NLP coach Jen Casey to the show! Hailing from NYC, Jen is focussed on helping coaches sell profitable group programs by incorporating psychology into their sales techniques. She also has her own podcast called the Inner Boss Podcast, so make sure to check that out! As you probably know, here at The Strategy Hour we are pretty obsessed with psychology! Jen is all about perfecting sales language for webinars and in-person meetings and uses her techniques to change deep-rooted beliefs and alter the neural pathways that hold us back.  She has action steps for repeating patterns that create new pathways and habits that are more in line with our goals and ambitions and by learning these ideas you can help your customers do the same thing! This is a long episode with lots to think about, so you might want to grab a notepad and jot down some homework! Take part in the exercises and share your experiences on our Instagram, we love hearing from you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We did a survey to find out where you guys are currently at in your businesses, the areas you are struggling in, what kind of profits you are making and where we could come in and offer some guidance. What we’ve noticed from the feedback and about the industry generally is that there is an epidemic going on – one that involves the side hustle! So, we thought we better address this topic, not to pigeonhole you, but rather to give you the facts we’ve gathered.  The survey is technically still live, and the report is automatically updated, so you can keep checking in to see how the data shifts. In our email correspondence to you, we will link the survey and the results page for you to access easily. What do other similar surveys say? Where are most of you at in your businesses? What kind of money are you making or hoping to make? We get into all of these questions, revealing some super surprising results! Join us to find out what your sisters said about their side hustles!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Braden Drake, a California licensed attorney with a master’s degree in tax law joining our conversation. He runs an education company that teaches other small business owners how to get the legal and tax stuff in order to ultimately unf*ck your business framework! He’s a pro at sorting out all the accounting and tax mess we make in our businesses, all those things that are totally befuddling to most of us!  You’ll be happy to hear that he dishes out a lot of great strategy regarding lawyer-y things, and towards the end of our talk, he also gives away an awesome resource. If you need to do some damage control or brush up on your know-how around the sticky issues like choosing the right entity, paying quarterly taxes and avoiding Frankenstein contracts, be sure to tune in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve heard from a lot of people that going from contractors to employees is complicated, expensive and overwhelming, so for a long time, we avoided going down that road. But then we started looking into it and considered all the potentially good stuff about having employees, such as having more control over how they spend their time and when they work. On today’s episode, we want to talk about all the things to think about before hiring an employee, because the truth is, it is very different and a much bigger responsibility.  There are pros and cons to both, though, and that is why we share with you our experience over the last few years, so that you can be prepared for whichever scenario you choose. It’s all about looking at your business and figuring out whether you are in a financial position to take on a full-time employee and whether you are prepared to deal with the positives and negatives of you each option. Join us for everything you need to know about the people who do work for your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we welcome Aandra Bohlen, sales guru, inspiring friend, and all-round badass! She is here to demystify the sigmas around selling and the ways it is being taught. Her work is centered on developing and teaching entrepreneurs to create an amazing enrolment experience that leads to high conversion rates. She is an expert on sales calls and mentality and if you did not get the point already, she has it going on! We are going to talk about getting your mindset right and some real techniques for conversion so you are not going to want to miss this, we promise! Aandra has almost 30 years of experience in sales and we are so lucky to get to throw a bunch of questions at her, things we know you would love to have answered. We discuss getting past money-mentality blocks, perfecting your pitch and how to translate sales onto social media and your content creation process. Aandra has a bunch of great reframes of the sales thought process and we promise that this conversation is going to help do better and think better about your sales game. We also have a great activity that we really want you to do, so stay tuned for that! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Income reports can be super distracting and set you on a road of comparison, so instead of focusing on the exact dollars, it might be more useful to look at the profit and give you a breakdown of the biggest sources of income as well as the major expenses. Therefore, we are calling it a profit report and we want to ask all of you, even before we start, to DM us feedback – whether this format worked and helped you in your business.  In this episode, you will hear more about our thought processes around profits and expenses, but it is important to keep in mind that there are many different ways in which to approach this, so we are not suggesting that you replicate exactly what we do. For the sake of transparency, we also want to let all of you in instead of just talking about the topic. Really sharing the truth about our business, we believe, will be of much greater value to you than simply giving you a blueprint for what it should look like. The focus should be profit and figuring out what your goal is in this regard is more important than being able to say you are a six-figure business. We’re baring it all today, so don’t miss out!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talk about what it means to become a full-time creative entrepreneur. Scary thought? Maybe, but we’re here to tell you that starting your own business does not have to be the insurmountable project that it is often believed to be. Yes, it can be less stable and riskier in many ways, but what we are going to tell you today is really going to surprise you, and hopefully encourage you to take the leap of faith toward becoming a full-time creative entrepreneur.  Ultimately, our goal is for you to create for yourself not only a job but a sustainable income so that you can provide for your family while also enjoying the lifestyle you want. We share with you a bit of background about our early lives and how it shaped our desire to work for ourselves and talk about the different pressures and circumstances that influence your perspective on entrepreneurship. We also talk about getting to your success point ASAP, what you can expect in terms of free time as an entrepreneur and why this is all 100% within your reach. So, get ready for some encouraging insight!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are so happy to welcome back Christine McAlister! If you are not already familiar with Christine, she helps high achievers replace income and continue to grow their businesses and be generally awesome! This episode is a look behind the scenes on coaching, group courses and one on one programs. We want to try to help you to decide which might be the right one for you at any particular time. All of us on the show believe that different times require specific approaches, the trick is to know what you need and then follow that path to success!  In order to do this, you need to establish expectations and clarify your goals. This relaxed conversation will feature all of us sharing our opinions and experiences in this realm, seeing our students progress and helping you figure out what is the best fit for you. We are going to hash it all out for you listening please, so sit tight and do not forget to hit up our Instagram and DM us any thoughts, questions or reflection you might have! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we are joined by the fabulous Lauren Goldstein, CEO, and founder of Golden Key Partnership, a strategy consulting firm that helps businesses to scale smart in order to be more sustainable. There are tons to learn from her seasoned and scientifically backed up approach, so today she will be dishing out straightforward facts, particularly as it pertains to productivity and how it relates to your profit. She shares time-wasting tactics that many of us are skilled at and pulls up some new studies that illuminate what distraction does to our day. A question we often think about is what we need to be doing to move our business forward, and it can be stressful to decide which of the dozens of things to take or leave. Lauren weighs in on the matter with some simple, no-nonsense advice.  Being overwhelmed with tasks can lead to decision fatigue, which prevents us from effectively prioritizing the tasks that are most important. Productivity and processes can make or break an entrepreneur because of burnout or be the demise of business due to revenue and profit leaks. According to the IDC, companies lose 20 to 30% in revenue every year as a result of inefficiencies. This is a staggering statistic! Therefore, we bring you this episode that is guaranteed to help you improve your productivity, so be sure to join in the conversation! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show, everybody! Today we are going to be letting you in, even further into our business lives! As we continue to grow we are constantly asking ourselves, "What is the content that people want to hear about?" This goal of keeping you entertained, educated, and engaged is very important to us and we have always loved sharing our lives and work with all of you. When we started out, everything we did felt fun, fresh, and engaging and it was easy to share this with our listeners in a natural way. As we have grown things have changed and we have been more considerate in our choices but we want to carry on sharing stuff with you that is exciting, new, and informative. It has always been our best thing, being able to share something about a problem we solved or a strategy we discovered.  As we enter year four of our biz we have to continue to look for these opportunities when we have had a different reality from where started out and many of our listeners. We want to help you now and set you up for success in the future! We have a feeling that there may be some inaccurate perceptions out there of what is happening in our business. You are welcome to DM us on Instagram with your thoughts but we sense that people find us less relatable than when we started out and were smaller. There have been challenges in continually connecting with our audience as our situation has changed, our team has grown and so on but we want, more than anything, to stay relatable to all of you! We actually think we are probably in more similar situations to a lot of you than you may think! All this to say, we have resolved to let you in on some of this and share more of what is going on in our current lives than we have been! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Would you ever consider deleting your Instagram account if you had nearly 40 000 followers? Businesses go through different seasons and for a long time we had not been focusing on Instagram because we were otherwise occupied. But for some reason, our account remained semi-active and we were still slowly but surely gaining followers, even though we only really posted about the podcast and random bits in between. But the engagement was poor, so much so that we no longer saw the need to post at all or to have the account, and this set us on a rollercoaster of a journey of trying to figure out whether we should delete our existing account and start all over again. This might sound crazy, but we had what we believed were legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, and our intentions were so good!  We were absolutely convinced that this was the way to go, that is, until a comment or two from our audience and friends threw a spanner in the works and forced us back to square one. This was an amazing educational process that we came though as we learned a ton about ourselves, our business and what our approach to our followers should be. If you are thinking about deleting your account and starting off with a clean slate or just looking to grow your Instagram engagement, this episode is perfect for you, so be sure to listen in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talk about a fascinating topic, one that affects every single one of you in one way or another in your business. When we think about marketing, we tend to think about psychology in general and the things that inherently appeal to all people. But, there is a better way to approach marketing and it pertains to the different generations. Ever thought about why people of different ages think and behave so differently from one another and often bump heads, whether in families or in business? What we discuss today will shed a whole lot of light on this subject. We compare and contrast the generations, from the traditionalists up to Gen Z and everything in between.  Each new generation is constructed in a unique way with different things that impact how they view the world and what kinds of consumers they are. For this reason, marketing efforts should be adjusted accordingly to ensure that you speak to the needs of the generation you are targeting and so that you better understand why certain initiatives will be more effective than others. We have relied heavily on the research of the amazing Jason Dorsey for this episode, so a lot of the information provided here is from his work on the topic. Definitely check out his website if you want to find out more. Jason also speaks about a very interesting new thought about millennials, one which we will get into on this episode, so be sure to tune in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you have not already heard of the law of diminishing returns, it states that everything we do is on a bell curve and as we do more work so the results improve. But once we pass a certain point or amount of work, the results begin to lessen and the work we do becomes less effective. After a certain amount of time and effort, our results can even start to decline and drop off to a point below our earlier work! The main lesson we want to extrapolate here is that more work equals better results up to a certain point. As we work on projects, we have to find these points and understand how far our effort is going. We have to be able to apply this theory to our business otherwise we run the risk of shooting ourselves in the foot through overwork and time-wasting. We need to focus on productivity, how to spend our time wisely and when we are done with a specific task. Learning the answer to this question might take time but we can start to notice patterns if we are sensitive to this dynamic. This law will apply to physical as well as digital work and remember that your creativity and energy is subjective, we never really know for sure, but we can work on our mindset and perspective to minimize these negative effects. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today, we dive into the topic of owning and changing your deeply rooted beliefs. We are a lot like trees. Imagine you are a tree and you have an abundance of beautiful fruit hanging from you, but you also have fruit that is rotten, that you feel ashamed of and that you don’t want others to see. The only way to determine what the problem is, why there is this bad fruit, is to go through the entire system to see where the change needs to happen. On this episode, we talk about behavior, values, and beliefs using the metaphor of a tree – a helpful way to better understand ourselves and others. How do you bring about change in your life, where do you begin? We talk about where our values come from and how we can begin to not only change ourselves but our entire communities. Regardless of how ingrained you think your behavior is, we all have the ability to grow and improve and to even do a complete 180! This episode brings you inspirational stories and lots of practical advice for business, raising kids, and life in general, so be sure to tune in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are giving you a little break from the norm and offering a few updates on things besides Boss Project. That's right, this episode is dedicated to all those things outside of work, although some of it is more work! We both have a lot going behind the scenes, in our personal lives and we wanted to share some of what keeps us inspired, busy and our occupied when we are not doing our main thing!   This conversation includes a lot of life changes because that is what has been going on for both of us, personally. Hopefully, you will find it insightful, useful and show you just a little bit more of the world. We sure do love sharing it all with you, so let's go ahead and dive right in!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re excited to be talking about a number of awesome productivity hacks. We know this is a popular topic many have covered, but it’s because it shapes the future of your business and in fact, your day-to-day happiness! We sometimes get stuck in a rut where we simply can’t focus and work like we are able to at other times. Now, with the changing season, we thought it would be an appropriate time to relook at some of these daily practices and share what we’ve personally done to up our level of productivity.  In this episode, each of us will share three tips that have worked for us, including claiming your me-time, structuring your day, considering your optimal work environment and building rewards into stressful tasks. For all of this and more, don’t miss out on today’s productivity hacks episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is an episode that can apply to any of our listeners, no matter where you are currently at with your biz! There are always times that you need to get people on board and with what you are doing or hoping to do. Whether you are just starting out or ramping up to a new level, conversations have to be had with those close to us, in order to create understanding, buy-in and a system that can work for you. You need to be able to communicate where your passion lies and how you want to do things moving forward and these can be awkward conversations at times but we are here to guide you the process and make it that little bit easier! We want to help you to see what is important, what must be said and what can be left out. These are such necessary conversations with our friends, partners, and family and their buy can be the help that you need to get where you are going. At the same time, you do not have to rely on people being on board with us in order to be successful, you will have to gauge your own needs in this regard. Change, whether big or small, can be a gamble and moving in new directions often has no guarantees. We suggest a bit of planning of these types of conversations as well as some warning for the other party involved. Most people do not like big announcements sprung on them out of nowhere! We also want to mention that other people's feelings are not your problem or your choice but that does not mean they will not affect you. We want to help you make things go smoother in potentially rocky terrain, so join us as we dive in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s show, we will be answering our most frequently asked question: How did you get from point A to point B? We will be sharing what to do, when to do it and how to do it, in your first two years of business. These steps got us from zero dollars to nearly half a million dollars and we want to give you a step-by-step breakdown of everything we did along the way. Even if your goal is not to make half a million dollars, the strategies we implemented and the lessons we have learned can definitely be applied to any business goal. Whatever your ultimate goal, the strategies and the order we did them in are the same.  Inside this episode, we give you a business roadmap and the eight main steps we took to reach our goal. The order of these steps are key and that is exactly why we will be sharing them with you, in detail! To give you a little taste, here is how we are going to break it all down. 1) Build Your Foundation, 2) Craft Your Message, 3) Nurture Your Dreamies, 4) Streamline With Systems, 5) See The Big Picture, 6) Create Sustainability, 7) Formulate A Passive Business, 8) Reach Those #Squad Goals. Okay, are you ready? Let’s get started! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have a Boss Talk about a topic that’s been on our minds a lot lately, probably because we’ve been going through all these transitions. So today we discuss what failure is to each of us and how it makes us feel. We felt that it was really important to open up this conversation because there’s a lot of shame that can come with failure, and that makes us not want to talk about it! But sharing ideas around this topic will hopefully build even stronger support in our community as it is something that all of us has gone through at some point in our lives. As cliché as it sounds, failure is always an opportunity to learn – even though this is not what we want to hear when it happens to us. It’s true though, failure gives us another opportunity to try again and brings us one step closer to that thing that we’re supposed to be doing and that feels good! Don’t miss out on this episode and join in the conversation by sending us a DM on Instagram! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve previously done an episode about what you need to consider before starting a podcast, and we admit that it was a bit of a Debbie Downer, so today we want to do a follow up of that where we go over some of the things we’ve learned in the meantime. We talk about the reasons for starting a podcast and about everything you should have set up before you can start, including deciding on the extent to which to you will be involved and the equipment you will need to record and where to find it. On a more serious note, we talk about the profitability of podcasting and what you can expect to get out of it as well as different ways you might think of monetizing it. We then switch to chatting about bringing guests on the show and finding fun topics and conclude with our number one tip for getting your show noticed and sponsored, so be sure to join in on the conversation! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever been stuck with ideas and you just didn’t know if they were right for you or how to put them into action? We’ve been getting tons of questions from you all out there, most of the question being along the lines of, “How do you guys know when a product or a launch is the right thing to do?” and “When do you reassess and change things and how do you actually know that something isn’t quite right?” We’re here today to tell you about our past experiences and how we got to figuring it all out.  In our experience, we’ve always just kinda “did it” and generally made it happen. There haven’t been many ideas that have come up and ultimately didn’t end up being created. We’re digging into how we originally started and how we knew it was the right choice for us, where our heads were at along the process and what you can do turn your vision into daily actions. From idea to conception to sale, we’re giving you both parts of our system. Be sure to keep listening to find out more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With all these transitions going on lately, we’ve had to do some reflection because as we move forward. It’s important to figure out what we want and where we’ve been and so we decided to share some things you probably didn’t know about us starting our business. Emylee might be remembering everything as perfect, but it definitely wasn’t!  On this episode, we make a few confessions and share some of the behind the scenes info that we haven’t talked about before. You might find these seven things surprising, you might find them relatable, but maybe you find it encouraging to hear that we did not have everything figured out before we started our business. A lot of stuff we had to learn along the way – stuff we’re happy to share with you, so be sure to join us for this episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So as you may or may not know, Abagail is completely addicted to The Bachelorette and all the associated shows! She has been following them for ages and seems to know almost all of the rotating cast of characters from each season and the ins and outs of this huge TV show. So she thought, why not use the show as a way to draw out some important life and business lessons seeing as though they are exemplified so well during the action of the latest season and the format in general?  Even if you are not particularly in love with or follow the show that closely, there is a whole lot here for you! We draw out a few of these lessons and explain how they can impact your business in the long run, and all thanks to The Bachelorette! So make sure to tune in to a new twist on the regular Strategy Hour Show! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As you know, all of our lives are ever-evolving and the schedules and routines that organize our days are constantly in motion. A big part of this, for us, is obviously our business and we have learned some big lessons about riding the waves of change so that everything doesn't go terribly wrong any time something comes up. Today we will be talking about two major curveballs that life has thrown at us, one at Emylee in the form of childcare and one at Abagail in the form of her husband's uncertain career.  In the episode, we will be unpacking these stories and sharing the silver linings of each for your listening pleasure! The biggest takeaway that we want to share with all of you from this topic is that the choices you make as life changes must be the right ones for you and for your family. Not for others' standards or by their advice or opinions. Do not let the norms of society manipulate how you live your life! We are sharing all of this to support you and remind you that the right way is your way and with enough thought and time you will find it! With all that said, let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guess what’s back? Another Boss Project Summit! For those who have not yet joined us for one of these events, it’s basically an amazing, free business conference during which you can wear your PJs while attending in the comfort of your own home. We gather all the best entrepreneurs and business owners to teach you everything they know, from starting an online business to pivoting and scaling, and everything in between. Had to the Boss Project Summit website to sign up and get your virtual ticket. It is happening live on August 20th through to the 22nd, so make a note of that.  On this episode, we give you a quick overview of some of the topics that will be covered and the great sponsors we have for the summit. We also tell you how you should go about getting access to the summit and what an all-access pass will allow you to do. So be sure to get with the Boss Project Summit program!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, we get questions all of the time about which app is the best for each task. On today's episode of The Strategy Hour, we thought we would give you all of that and break down all of our favorite tools and tips for getting the most for your biz! We will go through each section of our business and give you a selection of what we use, recommend, do not like, and even some things that might be beyond your scope right now.  Remember, just because we use it does not make it the best or the one you should use. Often you have to patch together a toolbox that is best for your specific needs, but we are here to show you the lay of the land! We want to be as transparent as possible and often the reason we use a certain tool at this time is it was just the one we selected first! So all that being said we are sure you will get a bunch from this episode and might just find your new favorite thing out there! Let's get into some strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As your business is growing, you might find the need to hire a virtual assistant. How we approach hiring now is very different from what it used to be and getting someone who is the right fit takes a good portion of know-how. It’s a learning curve and a process for sure. The first step is to make sure that you actually need a person and that a well-functioning system or software application is not able to address the need, because that will naturally work out way cheaper!  When you’ve done your research and figured out that you absolutely do need a human to do the task, you might begin by asking for referrals. But how will you know if this is the right person for the job? Well, on this episode we share some of the greatest advice for hiring a virtual assistant – tips and tricks that you can apply to really any position you need to be filled. So be sure to tune for today’s Strategy Hour Podcast! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show everyone out there! So happy to have you and also so happy to have a great friend with us today! None other than Haley Burkhead to tell you all about how to make your business more profitable through automation and what she calls the scalability factor. Haley is our go-to texting buddy for all things business and we are basically texting best buds at this point! We are able to help each other out so much in times of need so we hope that what she has to say on the show today will help you too! All of us want you to have that consistency that makes a business work! This is what the scalability factor can do for you. It can take the parts of your biz that are challenging and the least fun and get them done; better, faster and at higher levels, so you can focus on what you to do; be creative and connect with your peeps! It is such a unique and well-proven model we cannot wait for you to share in the results! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are carrying on with listener questions, so do not forget to send yours in if you have any! You can do this on Instagram or on the Facebook Group, we love to hear your ideas and questions, so go ahead and ask away! Today we are tackling a question on how to keep communication clear, deal fairly with different amounts of input and how to keep a partnership strong and working well. We have talked about this a little before in other episodes, in different contexts, we have looked at the legal side, how we started out, how things have changed, our thoughts on partnership and breaking down our team. But it is high time for an update, so here we go! Truth be told, we do not really suggest you go out looking for a partnership like ours. We have seen again and again how difficult it can be and how businesses dissolve, we have just been very lucky in the way that we fit together. So this is us sharing our lessons that you can apply to your team in whatever shape or form it is in now or takes in the future. We are sharing some strategies that have worked for us in resolving conflict and sharing the roles of a business and truthfully, it has mostly been really smooth and easy for us, but that is not always the case. So join us as we break down some tools, books, software, and ideas that can make it work that much better for you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something that we repeatedly get asked about is content, specifically around what should be free and what should come at a cost, which platforms should be used to deliver the content in the best way. This is especially relevant for those of you who want to transition from services to digital offerings where you teach what you know. Truth is, there are so many different ways to approach this and this gets us overwhelmed very quickly. First of all, we’re going to give you permission to do less! So if you feel like you are doing too much and overcomplicating it, you probably are.  If you’re running a strictly service-based business and you do not have a consistent income in that $5000 to $8000 range yet, then creating content is a massive distraction that is taking your time away from getting more clients. But if you have reached that six-figure goal, there are really two main ways you can progress from here. One, you create an agency model, take yourself out of the work and hire people to do the work and you just scale from there by adding more people. Or two, you start doing less of what you’re doing now by transitioning to teaching other people how to do what you do. And this is what we’re talking about today: dos and don’ts when pivoting from services to courses, so stay tuned!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking about a really hot topic and something we should all be talking about more often! We will be unpacking inclusivity and diversity and our own experiences and the lessons we have learned in this area. We will be drawing mostly from our recent summit and what we took away from the event that we will carry forward. This episode will have actionable strategies and tips about how to invite everyone to your table. We have spoken on this topic in various ways on the podcast before but it definitely deserves a dedicated episode, so we will be discussing community over competition, inclusion in our own company, the speakers we invited to the summit and what to do when something rubs you the wrong way.  We all have a responsibility to open up these conversations if we are going to make any progress as a society. Do not worry, you are not alone if the discomfort itself makes you feel uncomfortable! There is a lot of work to do and processing all of this is not always easy but you learn best by doing and mistakes are okay! It is a big misconception that we will all get it right every time, so do not put too much pressure on yourself in that regard, rather commit to learning, listening and trying your best to contribute to important change! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today’s episode is mostly for the listeners out there whose businesses are under the $500k a year earning mark but who have this possibility on the horizon. We want to talk to you about the growth that happens around this point and for you to ask yourself whether you really need to keep growing. The reason this is an important question is that as you scale past $500k you actually may not increase your profits.  This law of diminishing returns is something we have experienced at Boss Projects as we grew. What does it really mean to have a seven-figure business? The answer might not be quite what you expect. In order to get you ready for these possibilities, we will be talking accounting and the different ways that making money works in your business. So if you are ready to start making your revenue work for you and to keep your profits up, listen in, we cover it all! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many times people come to us and ask where they should start with their business. They’re overwhelmed and feel like they’re having to do so many different things when really they want to focus on doing only the things that actually get results. You can also get totally snowed under by the ideas and opinions of others. The biggest detriment can be wanting to have all the bells and whistles of a thriving business and wanting all of them straight away. We argue for the opposite: first, get the foundational things in order and get really good at it before worrying too much about the fluff.  Here is a construction analogy: In the Midwest, houses often have basements because their foundations have to be built below the snow line, otherwise it will crack. The same applies to our businesses: they require really solid foundations. Some of you have to take a few steps back and dig out a basement so that the structure of your business can be healthy and sturdy. A foundation allows you to have stability, and frankly, without a foundation, you don’t have a sustainable business. Today we’re talking about what’s involved in those initial stages that many people are skipping or putting off, so get ready to join us for another fun episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast!   Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Strategy Hour ya’ll! A couple of weeks ago we had a workshop and we got a few comments that caught us totally off guard. This came after we spoke about using referrals and tapping into the resources of your inner circle to jumpstart your business. We know what we are talking about when it comes to network marketing, but there is the icky side of this that involves random messages from people you haven’t been in contact with for ages and then they suddenly need something from you. That is not what we are advising you to do!  These “Hey Girl” messages are simply not the way to go! You don’t even need social media to have the conversations we are urging you to have. But if you are using social, here is our ten cents about it: respond to others in the way that you want to be responded to. Building our business came down to personal relationships and conversations and today we’re sharing more of our personal experiences and successes on this front. So be sure to tune in for this episode of Strategy Hour, and find out how to create those meaningful business relationships!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are so happy to welcome the combined force behind the The Product Boss Podcast, Jacqueline and Minna! Through their show, they teach business owners how to grow product-based businesses with strategies and a strong community. Each of them have their own business as well and have taken their personal work into their joint venture, offering their expertise as a great service to other creatives out there! Today's talk is all about taking your products further and the idea of going deeper instead of wider. Although Jacqueline and Minna mainly focus on product-based business, these strategies can be applied to whatever you are working on with the basic idea being to make more of the customers you already have rather than going to find new customers from scratch. So let's dive in and hear what they have to say! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on The Strategy Hour we’re diving deeper into what exactly we mean when we say that is should be easy and fun to make $100k from your service based business, within a year. There’s a misconception that money cannot be earned without really hard work, and to an extent, this is true, especially for certain types of businesses. But you also have to be smart about it! Just to reiterate, when we say it’s easy to make six figures, we are talking about offering services like copywriting, designing and photography. And this is by doing the basic work only, aside from all the other side offerings like podcasts and training courses.  In fact, you should keep it as simple as possible, focusing on doing one thing really well instead of doing a bunch of different things. These other ideas are not bad, but until you’ve done the one thing properly, you won’t enjoy its full benefits. We’re also guilty of this and we’ve seen many of our mentees battling with the same thing. Today we’re breaking this down in a way that we hope will help you not to fall into the trap of believing that diversifying will necessarily expand your business and make you more money. Whether you’re thinking of adding on products or offering more services, you think that the single solid service you’re offering will not get you to your financial goals. Today we’re busting that myth, and we’re going to show you have it is totally possible to achieve your goals by sticking to the basics. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everyone! Welcome to another episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast. Today's show is dedicated to chatting about all the latest things we are addicted to, the things we are digging and what we are into right now! Sound exciting? We hope so! Luckily for all of you, most of these of things are all things that you can buy, so you can use this as a fantasy shopping list if you so please, no one is stopping you! So basically, in this episode we are just going to chat stuff today; stuff that helps you get one step closer to your own personal success. Take your cues from us! We have scoured our lives to find what is making them better and bring them to you. We are talking the last six or so months in gadgets, ideas, aids and plans. And believe us, there is no shortage of it! So without further ado, let's get to the list! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re pumped to do another Boss Talk episode today! Our question for today is, “Did you have any fears when you first started your business?” Before we jump into this though, it’s worth mentioning that Emylee has a habit of conveniently forgetting all the negative memories of an experience, looking back at them with rose-colored spectacles! Nonetheless, we’re talking about fears and what it was that drove our decisions in those early days of starting our own businesses.  There were many factors that played a role in those decisions, including long-distance relationships and being desperate to move closer to our families. In this episode we share some of our fresh-out-of-college experiences trying to navigate new phases in life and trying to figure out what our next steps would be. We also chat about confidence and what motivated us to start our own businesses and the many considerations involved, so join us to find out more about our early days as startup entrepreneurs!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here at Boss Project we remember being young in the game; it was not that long ago! It is easy to look around and feel frustrated at everyone else's success, the success you are so badly lusting after. We usually try and figure out what our heroes are doing and how we can mimic it to get to where they are. Something that flipped this whole dynamic for us was the idea that you should never be comparing your beginnings to someone else's middle. This sentence stuck with us for a long time and helped us to take down our guard and look backwards to where other people started instead of where they are now.  Try this with us; think about a popular business or business person that you admire, one that makes you think, 'Damn! I want a piece of that!' If you want a business like theirs or something similar, the chances is are you keep them in mind pretty often. Now believe us when we tell you that almost all of them started with services! That's why we have launched our new program this week! It is called Start with Services and it is the bomb! We know that for most of you, the biggest hurdle is not having nothing to sell or no great ideas, but rather that you need more leads and buyers. We teach the exact methods for these things. We want you to be able to go to your inbox and find new and interesting leads there every morning! Wouldn't that be great? So we made this program just for you to get there. Let's start this journey together! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome to a really, really epic episode! We are so excited to share some amazing stuff with all of you today, we can barely control ourselves! Okay, so we have a brand new program that we are launching and it is probably the best thing that has ever existed, anywhere, at any time. It is called the Start with Services Program and we are going to be digging into all its great benefits and telling you exactly why you should be signing up yesterday. We do not say this lightly, you could just go straight over the website and sign up immediately, it's that good! So if you are interested in getting booked out in your business, which you obviously are, look no further! The thing that we have noticed is that most of you have amazing services, that is definitely not the problem. You have skills, ideas and all the rest in bucket loads. You know your craft and we would never claim to be able to teach you that side of things any better. We just want you to have more opportunities to share these gifts with more people and more clients. That's where the program comes in, it will guarantee and we mean guarantee, you more leads. In fact, you will most probably have more leads than you will know what to do with, so what are you waiting for? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last time we shared a lot about our personal journey and the mishaps we had. Everybody makes mistakes, but we hope to learn as we go. So today we’re talking about the things that you might be getting wrong in trying to scale your service based business. Regardless of where you are in the process, these mistakes can be made at any and every level. So the episode today is going to involve a conversation that no one else is really talking about. You might have incorporated some of the most popular strategies with the hope of landing more clients but have discovered that they are ineffective.  Trust us when we say we’ve tried and tested every trick in the book! Sometimes the problem is that we are aligning the wrong goal with the strategy. Other times we try something just because everyone else is doing it and it seems to be appropriate for the service we offer. We are bombarded with information about how we should run our businesses, and sometimes this just clouds our judgment and overcomplicates everything. Get ready to find out how to fix these bugs with some practical examples from our own experience, so be sure to tune in for this episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show everyone, today we are talking about the lessons we have learned in the failed businesses from the past and giving you the scoop and how much you should lean into your dreams. We start businesses for a number of reasons, maybe you were laid off, want your own identity back, can't find another job, hate your current job, whatever it is, it is valid! So when we start something we usually tell ourselves a story of why we are starting it, we might want to be our own boss, make more money or any other of a plethora of reasons. The problem is that our strategies often do not match these initial motivations and we can find ourselves in our 'dream job', in a nightmare arrangement! In our experience, this is the number one cause of burnout and panic attacks. If you do not allow yourself the space and grace to live the life you wanted when you set out on this journey, you might find yourself hating your biz more than any other thing you have done. Why would you want that? Some of us make big sacrifices in the beginning, telling ourselves that we will get to where we need to be one day and that this discomfort is only temporary. This usually lasts a long time and the hole only gets deeper, so do not dig yourself into it in the beginning! Why not guarantee your business and lifestyle of your dreams from the start? Take control and make the life you want, you do not need anyone's permission for that! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Melissa Megginson! She is the Community Manager and resident Cat Lady at Tailwind, a company that is dedicated to helping brands with their visual and Pinterest aspirations. Tailwind can really help you and your biz conquer Pinterest in a way you might never have thought was possible. We really love Melissa and the work she does, Tailwind has helped us out a lot over the years! They offer organic and free ways for you to get more engagement, traffic, and customers on the platform and that is exactly what we are going to be talking to Melissa about today! She will also be filling us in on what is new and exciting on Pinterest and what we might expect for the future. We have pretty much loved Pinterest since the beginning and were definitely part of the 'Pinterest wedding' generation! You know what we mean! Over time we have watched it evolve and change, thankfully not as much as some other social platforms out there but there has been some definite development and growth since we started using it. We began using Pinterest for business pretty early on in our company history and definitely found that Tailwind helped tremendously with our efforts, so let's hear what Melissa has to say! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We did this kind of crazy thing and started up yet another Facebook group, while everyone else is shutting them down left and right! What we’re talking about today is the thought process behind it, who the group is for and how you can get your booty inside. This group is specifically designed for service-based entrepreneurs who deliver a creative tangible product, so designers, photographers – listen up! You would have to apply first, but don’t be put off, this is just to make sure that only the most relevant peeps have access, so simply head over to bossproject.com/booked.  In this episode, we let you in on where we got this idea from and tell you exactly what we are aiming to achieve with this new platform. It is about our business, but it is just as much about helping you and other creative entrepreneurs grow and get the most relevant, helpful input you can get. Be sure to join us for this episode of Strategy Hour to get all the details! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on The Strategy Hour we are joined by the amazing, the wonderful, the gifted, Melissa McGraw! Melissa is the founder of The Creative Potential, an agency dedicated to helping online business owners increase their traffic and revenue through improved SEO. She and the company have aided countless brands to grow their audience by millions and applying her strategies can multiply your organic search results tenfold in just a few months! With Melissa's help, we are going to be breaking down SEO in the most simple of ways, not getting too nerdy but also not skimping on great, actionable plans and ideas. We want to get you ranked on Google ASAP! Get your notebook ready so we can start getting more traffic and customers and have that reflect in your bank account! It's been a while since we have talked about SEO and just as a reminder, it is very important for all, and we mean all, businesses! If we are honest, SEO is still a foreign language for some of us, while some of us have kind of got the hang of it. Our goal today is to get your site search engine friendly and high up in the rankings! We will be going from the simplest questions about what SEO is and how it functions, how to utilize it for your biz and even touching on some of the higher end stuff that will get you to the top of the first page! These strategies are super accomplishable but it is also worth noting that you are able to hire someone like Melissa to help you out with this task, get an expert to do the work for you, so there is that option too! Now, let's get you found online! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gift giving might not be your love language, but you should pick out any opportunity to dazzle your client with something special! Sometimes the biggest gift you can give is communication: being 100% clear about where you are in the process, at all times, cause most clients just want to see results and that they’re getting the best quality. When we land new clients, we often quickly forget about them when we go back into our little cubby holes to dig into the job they’ve given us – and perhaps we don’t even see them again. We need to stop this weird behavior! There is so much to gain from staying in contact when we get paid or once we have completed the job. What can we do so that that they don’t forget us, so that we make a lasting impression? There are three main parts to any relationship with a client: the beginning, middle, and end. It’s important to remember that your client can choose to get out at any stage of this relationship, especially if they feel like you’re not holding their hand throughout. It must have happened to all of us: you land the client, get going with the work, but then you get busy with other clients and trying to build your business and you end up ghosting them. So how do you prevent this from happening? Be sure to join us for this episode to find out how to absolutely optimize your client experience from beginning to end! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have yet another awesome duo on the show today! Jessica Rhodes and Margy Feldhuhn are equal co-owners of the company Interview Connections, the first and leading podcast booking agency. Jessica founded the business is 2013 and Margy joined just a couple of years later, and now they have a booming business, booking podcasts left, right and center. They are totally on fire, and today they’re sharing with us how we can DIY getting on podcasts, what sort of return on investment we can expect and how we can measure what we’re actually getting out of it.  You’re going to walk away from today with tips on how to approach the conversation and build the relationships, show up for the interview prepared and how to make the most of it. So even though you guys are going to have many voices in your earballs today, it’s going to be so worth it! Many of you have asked the questions they are answering today, such as how effective podcasts really are for building brand awareness and how to go about doing it. We’re revealing all of this and more, so don’t miss out! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We remember our first good sales experiences so well! It can be one of the best feelings in the world and it does not have to have that slimy and sleazy feeling to it at all. Today we are talking about what we are actually doing and the process for having more efficient, successful sales meetings, that just feel better. No one wants to feel icky and coercive when they are pitching and the truth is you really do not have to! What you really need to learn how to do is to let people fall in love with your offer, so it is less about selling and more about showcasing your process. If you follow these simple pointers the actual sales pitch will be a home run, we promise! We have spoken at length recently on the podcast about locating your ideal and appropriate clients and this episode is essentially what to do once you have found them. Bad experiences in this department can make you feel terrible so we are trying to steer as far clear from these as possible. You do not want to be word-vomiting your way through nervous, un-researched meetings. These can leave you feeling like a wreck and with no more money to your name! Let's rather get strategic and get selling!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Looking for a fantastic opportunity to flourish in your personal and professional life? On the show today we have the amazing Jordan Lee Dooley with us! She’s a speaker, blogger, podcast host, entrepreneur and now an author who loves encouraging and advising women to live with more honesty, passion, and grace – basically all the good stuff! Jordan is going to give us some of the key insights from her new book Own Your Everyday that is going to help us be the best version of ourselves.  But before you think it’s all pie in the sky ideas, she gives us the actual steps to doing that, from overcoming distractions and anxiety to cultivating a mindset where we’re no longer comparing ourselves to others. This is going to be a great episode for all of you who feel like you are going through a season of personal growth and for our sisters out there who might need a loving kick in the butt to get down to the business of becoming your best self. And let’s not mess around, we probably need all the help we can get, so tune in today! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is all about the required step that you need to take in order to successfully sell what you do. That's right we are giving you the tools to really beat your imposter syndrome and beat it well! For the last couple of weeks, we have been speaking a lot about where you clients are and how to find them, this is a big internal piece and it means getting over a big hairy monster! We also suffer and have suffered from this issue, so do not fear, this is the way to crack the code and move forward. We know you are doing this so no need to hide in the reeds! We see you convincing yourself that if your work gets better you will get more clients and that the reason you are not currently getting more clients is because of the quality of your work. It is easy to start thinking you should work for free or very cheaply and get into the churn of lowering your value so that one day the glory gates will miraculously open and you will have arrived.  You know this is not the world we live in! It is not like your portfolio does not have any say in your client base but so many potential clients out there are less concerned with your portfolio than you. Customers are not in your field and do not have as discerning an eye as you do, they are more interested in the experience you are selling. So we are here to tell you to stop selling yourself purely on what you have already done and how good you think you are, not everyone knows good from bad as well as you do! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today, Emily Benson, is an expert in everything retail, working for companies like Abercrombie & Fitch and Club Monaco. For those who aren’t aware, 80 percent of boutique owners go out of business within their first two years – most often because of a lack of education. Emily’s boutique training academy is here to help lower that percentage, offering both beginner and advanced coaching to people who want to grow their boutiques. But it’s not only super helpful to product-based businesses; her advice is applicable to service-based babes too, because business is business, right?  On this episode we’re talking inventory, margins, increasing profits and generally making smart business decisions based on the results you are currently getting in your business. So whether you’re selling t-shirts or courses, it’s all about paying attention to your data, customers, and trends and we are going to dish out detailed strategies for exponential business growth. So buckle up, take down some notes and get ready to learn a whole bunch from the boutique master herself! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So we have been propagating some pretty scandalous ideas lately and they have got some of you thinking and moving! Today we are dropping the full knowledge bomb on all of you about the myth of online businesses. A lot of you seem to still be convinced that your next client or even all of your clients will be found online and to be honest this is just not true. If you run a service based business you need to rethink your model! Just to be clear this does not mean that your clients do not use the internet or are not on Facebook and Instagram, it just means that people find services and make connections in real life and through referrals, people! We need levels of trust and real life relationships will always trump online advertising and presence.  This is the know, like, and trust principle. So think about human connection, your personality and those tactics that can work in these arenas. It's like as a community we have become confused. A lot of us have started small businesses trying to mimic huge online businesses rather than think about what will get us going in our own stream. This line should have been drawn more clearly a long time ago! These are growth strategies for people with already established client bases, not tactics to find new clients when you are starting out. If you follow this popular online strategy and social media presence rulebook, you will end up with no clients! This is true all over the world, so get your head straight and let's find you some clients! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today is all about learning to focus and just doing the actual work! We often play work, procrastinating, doing the fun little things and walking circles around the actual tasks, and then we wonder why we are not succeeding or reaching our business goals. In this episode we are joined by Jonathan Cronstedt, the President of Kajabi, who tells us exactly what we need to hear about the actual requirements for positive business results. Kajabi is a majorly successful company in the digital world, serving online entrepreneurs and helping them to overcome all kinds of technology challenges. In their 7-year history, the company has had back to back showings on the Inc. 5000 and has helped its users sell over $400 million dollars of their products via the platform. This is bananas, right?  We talk about marketing and the online space, using Facebook Lives to grow your brand and generate sales, and we get into identifying distractions versus opportunities and how to be more productive in general. Jonathan emphasizes the need for mastering one marketing area rather than trying to do a bit of everything, and why it is so important to see a strategy through. Jonathan has so many amazing stories that will resonate with you and that’ll help you in your business, so don’t miss out on this straight up awesome episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody! Today on the show we are giving you a very important lesson, so listen up! We learned this lesson just the same, so the sooner we can get this through to you the better: content creation will not get you more clients. Yes, we said it. We used to blog five times a week sometimes, and saw almost zero increase in clients from it. In this episode we will be breaking down why exactly it just does not work as a strategy and what you should be doing instead. In fact, we are taking it as far as to tell you why you should stop building an online business altogether and instead focus on growing your local reputation, which can take you further, grow you faster and make you more money! This episode is perfect for service-based biz owners, so copywriters, photographers and designers, we are talking to you. We have to admit that we do love content but if you think that it will land you new clients, you are sadly mistaken. New people will not just magically find you on social media or your blog and want to start paying you money out of nowhere. We hope you can see that this is a ridiculous idea. One trouble here is that we see our heroes creating great content and we want to mimic this, but we have to remind ourselves that they are rather serving an established customer base through that content rather than building one from scratch. The clients we are looking for out on the internet are usually waiting on our very own street, we just have to go out and get them! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining us today on the podcast is Kali Rogers, the Founder of Blush Online Life Coaching, a life coaching business aimed at female millennials. Kali is here to teach us more about the super do-able, fun and stress-free Pinterest strategies that have boosted their site traffic and sales and grown their clients and customers. The best of all? You don’t need a Pinterest marketing degree to implement them, you can start today! If you have a Pinterest account but have stopped using it for some reason, we hope this episode will inspire you to get back into it, or if you have been utilizing this potentially awesome tool, that you will get what you need to brush up your skills even more.  In the beginning, Kali used Pinterest for personal reasons such as recipes and fashion inspo, until she decided to take a break. At first she didn’t see how Pinterest, a mostly visual medium, would be applicable to Blush, a service-based business. How would she promote a life coaching business through images? When she first started she didn’t have any entrepreneurial skills but realized that she needed to communicate to people that she and her team knew what they were talking about. She resorted to writing as a cheap, safe means of publicity, creating numerous articles for The Huffington Post, including “An Open Letter From Introverts To Everyone Else”, which went completely viral. Many people have a Pinterest account when they first get started in business, but then they get distracted along the line and stop using it on a regular basis. In this episode we are going to show you that, even though it’s an oldie, it’s still a real goodie. So be sure to join us for this awesome conversation! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ready for our drop-the-mic statement? Service-based peeps listen up: You already know your next client, and guess where she is not? Online. In this episode we are sharing with you the secret double whammy referral engine that service-based owners can use right now, today, to get booked out within thirty days. This exact method can be used to get a constant stream of referrals who pay quickly and who are a dream to serve. Today we are unwrapping the secrets of a super effective referral engine for service-based businesses and we’re coming at it from two, no three, different angles, starting with that first important connection and going onto how existing clients can be leveraged to gain even more quality leads. But before you think you’ve heard it all before, we are not giving you the same old tips and tricks, we’re dishing out hot off the press information, things that very few people have heard of. If you have ever worried about where your next client is going to come from, grab a notebook and a yummy cup of something because this episode is going to knock your socks off! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are joined by the wonderful and inspiring Kathleen Cutler! Kathleen has worked behind the scenes on multiple million dollar online stores with her main area of focus being jewelers. She has coached over a hundred different jewelers to help them achieve their business goals and get their products selling online, but Kathleen’s expertise extends so much further than just jewelry! She wants to help everyone selling products or even services online to extend the experience of the customer and drive sales through the type connections that you would usually associate with a physical retail space.  Along with all her incredible business skills, Kathleen is also an awesome speaker who will be joining us at our upcoming Product Powerhouse Summit! Make sure to go get your free ticket immediately! She will be one of many great speakers talking about the world of online product sales and marketing and getting your store busy and making that money! So without further ado, let’s get into today’s strategy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Word on the street is that you want to do an epic launch! On today’s podcast we’re talking about three things that led to an incredible launch: using affiliates, getting together a street team and of course having a valuable product that everyone wants. But what is a street team? We’re discussing the need for one of those, no matter how big or small your business is, dishing out advice on who you might want to include, the process of asking someone to be on your team and how to communicate effectively with them. We then give you a breakdown of how we succeeded in pulling off our recent rebranding launch, sharing how we kept our followers and fans engaged with our communications, what we did to promote this change and our business at large. From our first-hand experience with launches, we advise you on using affiliates as an incredibly powerful tool to market your brand, giving you practical tips for recruiting key people who can really boost your business, even if you are only starting off. If you have a launch in the pipeline, thinking about it, or just want to learn a ton about making valuable connections in business, do not miss out on today’s Strategy Hour Podcast! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we are joined by our wonderful friend and all-round badass, Sarah Peck. Sarah is the founder of Startup Pregnant, a New York City based company dedicated to documenting women’s leadership. She is a writer, yoga teacher and hosts Startup Pregnant’s weekly podcast too! Her goal is to amplify women’s voices and promote their business through her work and she definitely has one of our favorite brains in the game! We share a lot of her business philosophy and will be using this episode to geek out on some strategies for listening to your audience as a way to help grow your product or service. This super under-utilized and somewhat simple strategy can help you and your biz so much! By paying closer attention to your audience, you can really improve what you offer and make the direct connection between those paying you and what you provide for them. Quite a straightforward equation, right? This is the second time Sarah is joining us on the Strategy Hour and if you haven’t heard her previous appearance go back and check it out immediately, it’s Episode 185! This episode’s topic was sparked by a conversation a few days prior where we were chatting to Sarah about business philosophies and implementation of these. We really believe in these ideas and they are so in line with our core values that we could not resist having her on to talk all about it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are taking you through everything that we have messed up on! Products, launches, events, campaigns, everything! We have made a checklist of all the things we kind of wished we had done differently over the last few years, but at the same time we do need to say that for the most part, we think the mistakes were necessary and don’t believe in wanting to travel back in time to fix past problems. We all make choices as best we can at the time, so hypotheticals do not really exist in real, present tense life. All that to say, we do not really regret any of these decisions but want to play this game where we can look back at things and see where we might have gone wrong. Also, it is important to remember that our experiences are not yours. Things that did not work for us, might be amazing for you and your business. We are not making blanket statements about all businesses, because most things work for somebody at some point in time. Most mistakes are more about wrong time and wrong personnel than anything else. So without further ado, let’s get into our flops! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by our great friend, Jordan Ellis, from Jordanené Clothing and she is here to talk about the importance of building a community in the success and longevity of your business. Jordan is also speaking at our upcoming event, The Product Powerhouse Summit, which we know you are not going to want to miss! It is going to be incredible with over 25 speakers in 3 days. So go sign up right now, it is free! Today’s chat is kind of like a trailer to that and she will be giving some insight into the idea of creating community in your business’ particular niche and the benefits that can come from this. Jordan has been around our community since day zero and is part of our ride or die community, the exact thing that she wants to help you build. We will be talking about her journey with this and she even credits the TCC community with helping her learn the importance of connecting with people, her customers and peers! For Jordan, this means her mailing list, repeat customers, getting feedback, and much more. All these great tactics and strategies have helped her grow to where she is now with her product based business and you can even start to apply some of these ideas to your business, no matter if you are service based or are selling products. So come on, let’s get into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello again, you guys! Guess what? It’s time for another summit! In November 2018 we launched our very first summit and it was amazing. We started thinking about how we could improve on our already-spectacular event and came up with the idea of focusing on a very special portion of our audience, particularly because there seems to be a lack of resources for this type of business owner. The upcoming summit, called Product Powerhouse Summit, is especially aimed at all the product-based babes and those aspiring to step into the retail market, whether you have your own boutique or want to introduce e-commerce to your website.  Just to lay it all out there, it’s 100% free to attend! Simply head over to the Boss Project Summit website to claim your complimentary ticket. We’re going to have about 25 speakers over three days, from April 9 –11th. You are going to get 24 hours free, which would allow you to watch almost all of the speakers. The best part of it all? It’s all virtual! As long as you have an Internet connection, you can access it through your phone, iPad, or on your desktop, and you don’t even have to be wearing pants! So stay tuned for the breakdown of the exciting topics you can look forward to! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Jill Stanton who is the co-founder of Screw the Nine to Five and certified affiliate marketing badass! She and her husband, Josh, have built a massively successful business out of helping other businesses partner with yet more businesses! Everyone wins and everyone earns! Their mission is to transform unsatisfied employees into dangerously successful entrepreneurs and build skills and resources to help them with their growth, so they can work as much as they want to, wherever they want to! This is such a hilarious and insightful episode, we know you are going to love every minute of it. We sure did, and by the end of it you will be at least one step closer to doubling your income through affiliate marketing. Jill’s brand of affiliation is not slimy and gross and is so simple to start today, no matter the size of your biz. We all know the bad reputation that these kinds of partnerships can have but this is not that, trust us! Jill is here to help you better serve your audience, stay inclusive and engaging, and make more money doing it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of your favorite podcast! Today we are answering your requests to break down the various roles we currently have at our company. So, just for all of you, we will be unpacking the size and impact of each of these in our beautiful little biz! We have been taking on new people and restructuring lately so what better time than now to do this exploration. We finally have a solid group and each role is pretty clear, which is more than we used to be able to say! We have to admit that for quite a long time certain jobs and departments remained quite a mystery to us, what they were really for and how much we could ask. Building a business is always going to include bringing people on and letting people go and it can sometimes prove quite hard to find the right fit. But we are much more confident right now than we have ever been! So at the moment, we have a nice mix of new faces and old hands and we have to shoutout once again to Traction, the book we have drawn so much inspiration from, for helping us figure out our company structure. We have had to change our mindset from small business owners to the CEOs and founders of a company, which is harder than it sounds! It has taken three years of trial and error and in the beginning, we did not even have plans to build a team at all! We are still figuring out how big we want to be; right now we stand at about 20 people working on things. Quite a lot, we know! Some of these are contracted out, some are employees, some are part-time, but it is quite crazy to us that there are so many heads together on our little biz! So stay tuned as we dive into our business together. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today we are very, very excited to have Jane Lu as our guest. Jane is the founder of Showpo and has been in Forbes, Cosmopolitan and won numerous awards for her business! What started as a small clothing store in her parents garage in 2010 has grown and grown to the huge online store that is today. Their goal is to reach $100 million in revenue by 2020 and boy do we think they will achieve it! Jane is so inspiring and we love the way her brain works, she makes fast decisions and is such a visionary; qualities that have taken her company to amazing heights. In our conversation Jane breaks down the milestones, learning curves, mistake, strategies and almost every important step in the process, so get ready to take some notes! This episode is a great insight into the turning points that any business faces and how to ride them out to success. Jane admits that some of the strategy she now espouses she has only seen in hindsight, quite an achievement for a business that now has 150 staff members and started with two racks of clothing less than nine years ago! Now, let’s get into the show. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, all of you strategists and biz queens! If you haven’t heard yet, we have been going through a big rebrand! All of our work will now fall under the Boss Project banner. That’s right, TCC is now a thing of the past and we are onto even bigger and better things! Since we have started this process we have been getting so many questions about the new photos we have been taking and sharing sporadically. We have to admit they look amazing and we are so proud of how they have come out. We look pretty good in them, if we don’t say so ourselves! So today we wanted to share some tips and tricks for organizing a great shoot! After this experience, we have loads of opinions and ideas to give you. In the past, we mostly went pretty DIY with the process with varying degrees of success and have learned many lessons, and this time we applied a bunch of that knowledge! This was the first occasion that we went full professional and the experience was so fluid and we were so prepared! In our discussion, we get into these preparations, budgeting, roles, and things to remember. So let’s get to it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everybody, we are super excited to have our friend Nikki Porcher on the show today! Nikki is the owner and founder of Buy From a Black Woman, which is an online non-profit organization that is bringing awareness and funding to businesses owned by black women! Nikki has had an amazing journey since starting this initiative and she now showcases a large number of black women business owners in her directory, Instagram, and in her shop. A fearless and natural creative, Nikki is so much fun to talk to and we know you are going to love this conversation too! During the episode we hear about this incredible journey that she has been on, starting with a blog, which became a hot Instagram account, then a directory and now a non-profit organization. She currently gives out grants to black women to start their business and get off the ground, providing a network of support and knowledge to aid them in their pursuits. We have to admit we learned a lot in this conversation and Nikki is so open in sharing with us and we ended off this chat just wanting to know more, support more and spread the love! There are so many great businesses in her directory and we should all be buying from them! It is so easy to do a little research, branch out a little further and diversify your world! Nikki is such a great example of turning your passion into something amazing and impactful and to be honest her story really reiterates a lot of what we always say! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s episode is a really big deal. We are bursting with excitement to share with you our motivation behind changing a key aspect of our business—the name! When you start a new company, the last thing you think about is changing it. Even though change can be terrifying, we hope that you will be equally as enthusiastic about the new direction we are moving into as we are. We assure you that we will do everything possible to continue serving you to the best of our abilities, and we can almost guarantee that you will love this change as much as we do. Part of the name changing process involves making our brand more inclusive by collaborating with online entrepreneurs who will be educating you on a wide range of topics. You will not be hearing from only us in the future but will be enriched by the knowledge of a plethora of experts in various fields of business. Be sure to tune in today to join in our celebrations and to find out all the cool new things we are going to be offering you. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we welcome Erin Abernathy & Steph Pulido from Out of Office Media. We are so excited to have them here on the Strategy Hour Podcast to talk about working with micro-influencers and how brands can create strong content and build a really engaged audience. Our guests are best friends, the co-founders of their company, and they have recently been recognized by Forbes! Their goal is to serve and interact with female millennials and they are now based in New York City. In their business, they work with micro-influencers, or those that have less than about 10k followers on social media, to grow their following and in turn aid a brand’s goals. This is really about building a small yet strong tribe whether you are a solopreneur, budding influencer or big brand. So if you are what may be called a micro-influencer and would like to dabble in working with brands and companies, creating another revenue stream, this episode might be just the thing you have been looking for. Erin and Steph offer a bunch of great strategies to get started, boost engagement, and niche down your market. So no matter what business or field you are in this can help you get to where you need to be. So without further ado, let’s dive in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everybody! On today’s show, we are talking about one of our favorite things — personality tests! If you know us at all you know we can’t get enough of these kind of exercises and understanding where we fit into each and every system. Today we will be discussing Enneagrams, our types, and Emylee’s controversial opinion that Abagail was mistyped in her first assessment. Enneagrams are relatively new to us, with Abagail doing hers first, just under a year ago. However, Emylee still feels she has enough expertise to assert some claims over Abbie’s type and what it really is, contrary to the results. We are doing this episode in the lead up to the Enneagram and Coffee Summit that is happening very soon, which we will be speaking at! So to get you excited for that, we will be spilling the beans on everything we know about the subject and how we relate to it. Remember to go get your tickets for the summit if you still have time! And if you haven’t already done the test, go take it immediately. You know you want another way to understand yourself! In the meantime, tune in to today’s episode for an in-depth look at how it all works. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the podcast all of you wonderful listeners! Today we have a great show in store for you, one that is less about how you make money and more about how you spend it. We know that most of us quite like doing that! Bethany Tran of The Root Collective is here to tell us all about how to spend your money in more positive ways to create a better world around you. She is a problem solver and entrepreneur who started the company to help serve struggling communities through job creation. She actually left a stable job to pursue this work and we applaud her for that. She explains The Root Collective’s business model as well as giving some general ideas and information on wiser ways to spend your bucks! Essentially, this episode is all about how we as women can spend our money in better ways and make a conscious impact on the economy and communities. Bethany has lots of ideas for how to implement these ideas and changes at a reasonable speed and we are pretty sure that after this episode you are going to want to buy some boots from her shop. You have been warned! She talks about branding, community, sustainability, and we ask her why she has the best hair in the world! Here at TCC we really believe that women rule the world and we need to step into the role as much as we can! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can you believe we have made it to Episode 300 of the podcast? How is this possible? We are so grateful to have had all of you along for the ride and cannot wait to do the next 300! As we go into our third full year here at TCC, we wanted to celebrate another milestone besides that one. Sometime during the last six months or so, without us even really being aware, we made our first million! We know, this sounds crazy but it’s true! So what does that number mean when we say we have made a million? From the start, we have said that we want to grow into a million dollar company and we have not actually reached that landmark yet. This just means that since going full-time with our educational courses that we have brought in a million dollars in revenue. Pretty impressive? Quite surprising? We think so too! To be completely honest though, as the years have passed we feel a little less concerned with the numbers and more with what they represent and for us the money shows the level of impact that we are making and this just feels so good! We feel so happy and lucky to have come this far and touched this many lives and businesses and now we have students who are even making as much as we are! Wow! So tune in, and come celebrate with us on today’s episode. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast! Today we are joined by Kimberly Crossland who is the former founder, owner, and operator of Savvy Copywriters, a communication and digital marketing agency based in Tucson, Arizona. However, she has now transitioned into a role as Content and Marketing Manager at Rocket Source and she is going to be talking to us all about this transition and how she went from a business owner to working directly and solely for one client. You might recall that this is the second conversation we are having of this type but today we are offering a slightly different perspective on the idea. We will be talking work-life balance, mental time and space, motherhood and creativity. This episode will hopefully show you a way that you can trim the fat off your work, if that is something you have been considering, and this roadmap might be just the inspiration you need to keep moving forward. This conversation is applicable to both service and product based businesses and from Kimberly’s specific journey, many applicable lessons can be extrapolated. These types of ideas definitely seem to be popping up more and more since we did our first episode on the subject and the online biz community is increasingly interested in scaling back and working more directly and with more focus. We hope you enjoy! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode! Today we talking about getting back into the swing of things in the new year. We will mostly be talking about our own experiences getting into work-mode after the nice holiday break we had over December. It is quite a personal episode, but we are pretty sure a lot of you out there will be able to relate! It feels quite weird to be back at work after the time off but you know we are excited and pumped up as usual. As you may know. we pretty much took the whole of December off, which was only possible due to the serious preparation we did throughout the year. In December we did a total of two interviews, two meetings, and our usual monthly coaching sessions. We did not work on any day to day things and for the most part were able to be lazy, relaxed, and bored as much as we wanted. The one exception was Emylee moving house at the end of the month, which was its own kettle of fish! But all in all, December was the much-needed break we both needed after such a busy year. So in this episode, we talk about how we prepared for the whole month off, how we are getting into gear now in January, and our intentions and hopes for the year moving forward. Let’s get into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast! Today our guest is Suzi Istvan from Splendidly Curious. Suzi is a brand strategist, marketing expert and has many years of experience working with a wide variety of different types of companies and organizations. She lives in upstate New York with her beautiful big family and we cannot wait to share this amazing conversation with all of y’all! Suzi is here to tell us about the roles of marketing director and integrator and how they can take your business from lighting up to burning hot! If your biz is currently small and just starting out or you are making a step up to the next level, trust us, this episode is going to help a ton! The chat was amazing and enlightening for us and we gained so much just talking to Suzi, so we are sure there will be a treasure trove of stuff for you to mine in here! During the conversation, Suzi even interviews us a little bit, which was fun! We cover how to build and coordinate your team cleverly and finding that all-important person who is as invested in your business as you are. This role, which Suzi and others have dubbed the integrator, can take a lot off of your hands and free up more time for you to explore and double down on your areas of genius. In the end, you are looking for someone who thinks of your business as their business and who can free up your mental load, so you can pursue all your dreams with more energy and vigor! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show, everyone! As promised we are doing the second part of our segment on hiring a full-time employee. So if you haven’t listened to part one yet, we recommend you go catch up on that, ASAP! In that episode, we covered the application process, defining the role, finding and vetting candidates. Today we are diving straight on into the interview and onboarding process. We will be doing a follow up part three in a few months to report back on the outcomes of this whole process, so stay alert for that in the not too distant future! Now, we have to be clear, we were looking for a unicorn. We needed someone who was creative and motivated but did not feel compelled to do these things in a business of their own. We have found that this configuration is quite rare and quickly found out that we would be lucky to nab someone who fits the bill. Having part-time or freelancers work for you can be great and you may love these people but there is a limit to how much they can actually do for you if they are running their own thing as well and you are only part of that bigger picture. This was one of the main reasons we were looking to fill this particular role, so we could get a little more out of a full-time employee and have someone who is as dedicated to our biz as we are! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show, all you biz badasses, and money queens! Today we have a great episode in store for you that you are most definitely not going to want to miss! Our guest is Jereshia Hawk and she is here to tell us about how she switched from a big corporate job to selling her services online and increasing her salary in the process! Jereshia was working on huge, high profile engineering projects when she left her job and during this first year of going solo, she managed to double her salary! Sound amazing? We think so! She has subsequently taught her strategies to hundreds of people online and helped them get going on their own road to success. A lot of what Jereshia teaches is a little different to the majority of information that is available online. She has a focus on grassroots growth that we just love! It was such a pleasure to have her on the show and the conversation is motivating and really informative for anyone looking to get out of their day job and start their own little thing. This topic is really near and dear to our hearts as Abagail started out on her own, selling services when she quit her corporate job and so much of what Jereshia says rings true for us. For a great conversation with a massively inspiring person, be sure to get it all on The Strategy Hour! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello all you wonderful listeners and welcome back to The Strategy Hour! Today we will be talking about a big step we took recently and when we say big, we mean really big! That’s right, we hired our first full time employee here at TCC and we are going to be talking all about the first part of this process and helping you think about this idea for yourselves. Before this everyone we have hired has been part time as a contractor and we were their client. To tell you the truth, we have been itching to get someone on board with more time and commitment to our business and this is when we decided to do it! When someone is an actual full time employee everyone can get a lot more out of the relationship and knowing boundaries and how and when to do what can be a lot clearer. We do have to admit that there was some hesitation on our part due to going into the unknown. We had some concerns about what this would mean financially and legally and so we asked ourselves and others a lot of questions before getting serious. When we felt like these were answered and it was the right time, we got serious! As we cover during today’s conversation, our favorite book at the moment, Traction, came in handy for some helpful ways in which to go about this process. So join us as we break down this big step and hopefully get you thinking about your own big steps too! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to The Strategy Hour! Today we are talking PR, media, and marketing with Christina Nicholson of the Media Maven. Christina was in news broadcasting for many years before she decided to start her PR firm and now helps businesses grow their brands by gaining exposure and using it wisely. Today’s show has Abagail riding solo as Emylee is away with a sick little one, but do not fear! It promises to be just as jam-packed and dynamic as usual with such an amazing guest. Inside this episode, we will be talking about how to get more media coverage, utilizing it, getting comfortable in front of a camera and much more! Christina also talks about common mistakes and simple tips for getting the most of out of your PR. As an industry expert from the other side of the fence, Christina really has a lot of wisdom to share on how to get noticed, placed and present well. We get into reaching out, who are the best people to speak to, and ways to make the process of marketing yourself more enjoyable for better results. For all of this and a whole lot more, you know what to do! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s show we are doing things a little bit differently, and taking you through a process that we at The Strategy Hour Podcast believe can make a world of difference in your life! This episode will be all about inventing a new possibility in your life, and you’ll see just what a shift this can make. Abagail tried out this exercise recently and found it super helpful and enlightening and so could not resist sharing it with our listeners. Full disclaimer though, it might be a bit of bumpy ride because let’s face it, most things that help you grow are not pain-free. But we promise you’ll thank us in the end! Emylee will be going through the guided exercise for the first time during the episode and you can join in with her and we can all get down to the nitty gritty together! A lot of the time we deal with the positive and negative aspects of lives in repeated patterns of behavior that do not allow for very much progress. The process we will detail is simple and straightforward, yet it really provides a lot of insight and hope into how small adjustments can change our lives in big ways. So if you’re game, grab a piece of you favorite notepad and buckle in, we’re going deep! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have our work husband, Parker Stevenson. Parker is our bookkeeper, our CFO, business adviser, our friend, our friend-enemy and everything in between. You have probably heard us mention Parker throughout this podcast series. He is like the Where’s Waldo? Of TCC and an absolute hoot. Today, we are revealing the mystery of Parker Stevenson and are going to be talking all about scaling a service-based business. Instead of teaching you sexy bookkeeping things, Parker is actually going to talk about his own business and give you a peek into some of his own business strategies. Parker went down the same rabbit hole that many entrepreneurs do, where he thought creating a passive online course program was going to be the solution for his business growth and scalability. But you’ll learn in the episode, how they decided it wasn’t going to work for them and why they decided to scale the service side of their business instead. Parker has a wealth of experience and is here to share with you why service-based businesses are severely underrated. If you are a new business owner or in the process of re-thinking your current online business model – this is definitely an episode you won’t want to miss! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, all of you wonderful listeners! We are so glad to have you back for this very important episode of our podcast! You know what time of year it is and you know we have done this before. Yes, it is time for us to each choose a word of intention for the coming year and to make sure that 2019 is the best one yet! While preparing for this episode we listened back to some of our previous words and new years’ ideas and got some serious flashbacks! They feel so long ago but at the same time are still fresh in our minds. Now we have to be honest, we came up with these words this morning! But at the same time we have probably been mentally preparing these ideas for ages now and in the episode you will hear all the background to why we chose our specific words and the pieces that came together to make this quick decision. We would also love to hear your own words for the coming year, so when you are done listening to this episode please share them with us, we would love to connect and affirm your choices. It is so impactful to communicate these ideas, it creates a sense of accountability and commitment! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s episode, we are super-duper excited to host Ashley Knight of The Hello Boss Community. Ashley founded the community as a means to support and bolster other businesswomen who were in the same boat as her. Through her group, she is able to teach and coach strategy to an ever-growing number of dedicated members and she loves it! And we love her for it! Here at the Strategy Hour Podcast we know the value the of groups we have run and been a part of, they can be the lifeboat bringing you back in when you are out at sea, so we know exactly what Ashley is talking about! In our discussion, we cover the early stages of starting a supportive community, relationships within this space, real-world events, social media, sensitivity masterminds and much more. Ashley is one of the most dedicated community founders we have spoken to and we are sure her attitude and advice is going to be wonderfully useful and inspiring to all of out listeners. So whether you are part of an online community or looking to start one yourself, this is definitely the episode for you. Listen in to get the low-down. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we dive into seven habits that we believe lead to a more productive life and a more productive business. These seven habits will ultimately help you achieve the goals and dreams you are seeking – whether those are personal or financial. You are one person, with multiple facets, and you can’t play blind to the fact that you have a life outside of work! We want to incorporate that into living a lifestyle that gets you where you want to go. These seven habits have been monitored over time in our own business. Whenever we are incredibly productive, we take a look at everything that we were doing over that time and ask, “What was a constant? What habits combined aided our productivity?” A lot of people ask us what is it that makes us so productive, and everyone seems to be waiting for that miracle answer. But the reason why we are covering seven habits is because it is never just one thing. It’s never just one thing you do that helps you sell more, or get more people on your list, or land more clients. It is a combination of things that helps to create a successful business and a successful human being. So take a listen and learn more about the seven habits we focus on that have led to more productivity in our lives and how it can lead to more productivity in your life too. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have such a great episode for all of you today, we literally cannot wait to share it! Today on the Strategy Hour we host Nathan Barry from ConvertKit! Now it may come as a bit of surprise he is not actually here to talk about email marketing and funnels and all that good stuff that we all love him for, but rather he is going to explain the big changes that almost happened at ConvertKit this year. We say almost because, for those who might not know, ConvertKit, the hugely successful and constantly growing company almost changed their name during the summer and then decided not to. So Nathan is here to give the low down on this experience, how it all transpired and the lessons he and the company took away from it. There is so much to learn in the episode so grab whatever you need. Maybe even some tissues because it gets a little emotional! We chat about handling audience reactions, moving forward with ConvertKit, difficult conversations, the big lessons, and much more! This conversation is such a true and honest reflection on a difficult and potentially disastrous process and it is not often we all get to have such an inside scoop on a true industry leader. So without much more ado, let’s dive right in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of your favorite podcast! We are doing all the end of year round-ups, reflections and strategy activities and today is all about getting that planning in for next year. We cannot believe 2018 is basically already over, it has just flown by and we are pretty sure you feel the same way! So if you have not yet got down to planning things for you and your biz, this is just what you need to get started and crush that session. We all need things on our calendars so we do not go stumbling blindly into the next rotation around the sun. So why not get down to it with us? We got you! We will also be giving a few sneak peeks into what we will be doing next year, so you are not going to want to miss that juicy info! We chat about making time for your planning session and how to prepare successfully as well as getting into some of the key aspects of realistic and inspiring goal setting. A key takeaway from today is how to look at the drivers of your goals and using this information to make more accurate and helpful plans. On top of this, we give a few frameworks and suggestions, things that have helped us immensely in the past and we finish off today’s show with some failsafes, so you don’t do a lot of planning only to forget about it a few months into the new year. So for all that and more, join us on today’s episode! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, all of you beautiful people and wonderful biz queens! Today on the show we are super happy to be speaking to our friend Indigo Colton about the recent switch she made from running her own business to become a full-time employee at someone else’s company. We think this topic has not really been covered enough and it is really an important subject to understand if this question ever arises for you. We will be hearing from Indigo about her thought process, the deciding factors and some of the potential red flags. For Indigo, the change was the right move and we will try and unpack why that is the case so hopefully you can keep making the right choices for yourselves! Some of you may already know Indigo but this peek inside her mind is a great way to get to know another side of her. We have a really interesting conversation that we know you are going to love! We have noticed that people seem to be a little hesitant to share their own experiences and inner workings on this subject, so it is just great to have an open and honest conversation about these things. We will be covering the feeling of going from being your own boss to the position of an employee, benefits, and things that can be learned at another business, networking possibilities and all of Indigo’s ideas and feelings in-between! So let’s get right down to it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody! Welcome to our round up of the lessons we learned in 2018! As usual we learned a lot, if not more during this last year, so we have so much to share with all of you. You also know we love reflecting and reviewing and this podcast will basically be a fleshing out of all the important steps we took and progress we made in our business. We are hoping that you will follow along with us and do the same sort of thing with your biz! Hopefully ours will give you some ideas of how to reflect on the past year and the important points that came out of it. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everyone and welcome back to The Strategy Hour! Today we are once again joined by our friend Steph Crowder for a Boss Talk session and we will be discussing the role of mindset in defining success. These episodes are definitely some of our favorites and it is always a pleasure having Steph sit down for a dive into an interesting subject. We actually stole this topic straight from her and she dug into her deep archives and pulled this one out just for our listeners. We will really be considering how to get passed mindset issues and how differently we combat these problems. It is such a great question and we cannot wait to unpack it right here on Boss Talk! The discussion covers a meditation on different kinds of mindsets and attitudes and how these impact levels of success. We then go on to talk about grit, determination, and perseverance and how vital these qualities are in any type of achievement. The topics of nature and nurture are also relevant and a large takeaway from today is that we do not start on an even playing field but we do get to decide how we play the game and when we get back up from a fall. For an inspiring chat with a great soul-sister of ours, be sure to tune in!  Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody and welcome back to our podcast! Today’s show is almost like a grown-up book review project, so just imagine us handing in a report and giving a presentation at the front of the classroom! The reason we are going back to school for this one is because the book in question has made such an impact on both of us and TCC as a whole, since we recently read it, that we just could not wait to share it with all of you. Today we will be talking about Traction by Gino Wickman and how it immediately changed our trajectory and gave us so many tools for our biz. We know you are going to love them all! We cannot say this enough, whatever stage of your business you are in, go read it! The book has so many great strategies and this is the Strategy Hour, after all, so there you go! Today we will be looking at a few of the exercises and frameworks that Wickman offers in the book, which cover goal setting, company roles, vision and loads of other good stuff. We guarantee that these tools will change your biz for the better, forever! The book contains fun and engaging quizzes and activities and we really recommend that you use it as a kind of workbook, moving through it with your own projects and departments. We will definitely be following this episode up sometime in the not too distant future with a report back on the effects of the framework, so keep your eyes and ears peeled for that sometime next year. So without more fuss, let’s get down to it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello listeners, and welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast. Today we are so lucky to have our friend Megan Hale to chat to us about the newest goal setting method she has adopted! What better time to talk about goal setting than November as we reach the end of another busy year and look forward to the next one. If you haven’t already started planning for 2019 then this episode is a great place to start! Megan found a way through one of the most challenging and action-packed years of her life and somehow managed, through all the commitments, to have her most successful and profitable calendar year yet, which we think is just crazy! Having a baby at the beginning of January and her husband leaving on military deployment soon after was not quite the comfortable start to the year that many of us might hope for. Let’s just say that with her business to boot, she had a lot on her plate! Anyway, prompted by this chock-a-block schedule she decided to start laying out some goals and what followed, quickly became her Good, Better, Best model, which immediately helped to achieve and exceed her minimum goals. Sound great? We think so! Megan does a great job of unpacking all of the juicy and useful parts of this. So stay tuned to hear how you can get a complimentary template from Megan to start you off! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast. Today we are diving into why we take every December off. Now the truth is, we love you all, but we are tired! Our brains hurt, our throats hurt, and it’s time to take some time away. Life can get incredibly busy, especially around the holiday season, and sometimes that can be just too much to handle on top of running a business full-time. We all know that as Murphy’s Law would have it, everything happens all at once; business picks up, family events are scheduled, big life changes happen, you name it! So inside this episode, we are diving into exactly why we have adopted this strategy of taking the month of December off, and what it has done for our business and our personal lives. We also dig into exactly how we manage to prepare and plan ahead with our team to be able to pull it off. Finally, we share all the juicy details to help you do it too. That’s right, you can do it too! Just take what you learn here from us today, see how you can apply it directly to your business, and jump on the magical train to free Decembers! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello all you business badasses and wonderful women! We are so glad to have you here for yet another episode of our little podcast. This week The Strategy Hour is all about dealing with what can be a very tricky and irritating problem. Yup, you guessed it: how can you go about approaching the issue of people not understanding what your job really is? Most of us as entrepreneurs and online business owners have encountered this dynamic in some way and it can be pretty tiresome and not infrequent! So what are we to say and do in these situations? Whether it’s at a family gathering or in another social or business setting, we want to talk a little about what it’s like and share a few ideas on how to deal with this. To help us unpack the issue we have invited our dear friend Courtney Foster-Donahue who shares our frustrations in these regards and she has some great advice for all of you introverts out there that you are not going to want to miss. So without further ado, let’s get into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the show! Today’s episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast is a breakdown of our recent amazing and wonderful Boss Project Summit! This was pretty much the biggest thing we have ever done at TCC and it has just wrapped, so what better to talk about than that? This behind the scenes look at the summit and the statistics that came out of it is just a taste of things to come. The few days over which we held the event had a massive impact and we had fun and made money and we cannot wait to share more of the in-depth information we have gathered. Bear in mind that it is still early stages in terms of the outcomes, which we will continue to collect and collate, but there is definitely more than enough to talk about today and give you the inside scoop after all the madness! We would be amiss not to send out a big thank you to everyone who made the summit possible and we are eternally grateful to our sponsors, contributors, the participants, and each other for bringing this great thing to life! We have to admit that we are already thinking about the next time and how we might make it better, stronger, and more of everything it was this time! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, and welcome back to The Strategy Hour. Today we are super happy to have a conversation with Bonnie Fahy, who is the founder of SourceIt where she helps her students and clients grow their businesses through outsourcing. Bonnie has a particular approach, which she calls “hybrid sourcing”, that can make your company run more smoothly and iron out some of the traditional issues with getting outside help. Bonnie is going to be telling us all about how it works and how you can use it to your great advantage. Sound great? We think so! She is going to be giving concrete, actionable advice on how you can build your team and grow your revenue through some very simple steps. So you are not going to want to miss this episode! The subject of hiring and how you go about sourcing your employees can sometimes be taboo; but don’t worry, in this fearless conversation we break down all these walls and give you the real inside scoop. Here at TCC we have had our fair share of successes and failures with hiring over the Internet and we are so excited to share Bonnie’s revolutionary and forward-thinking rules of the game with all of you, our listeners. Bonnie even tells us how she managed to quadruple her income in just three months using the strategies she is going to be explaining today! This means that by outsourcing smartly, you can have a lot more money in your pocket and also free up more time to do the things most important to you. Get ready, and let’s dive in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of your favorite biz podcast! Here at the Strategy Hour we always hope to give you the best advice, tools, and inspiration to get that business of yours popping and today is no different. This episode is all about a certain myth that has us a bit hot under the collar and we want nothing more than to dispel it! It goes something along the lines of not being able to reach your goals because of being overwhelmed by too much content and too many things to do. Now, we know this feeling, so don’t think it’s just you! But we are also here to tell you, get off your backside and start working because it is just not true and it is certainly no excuse to not put in the work! So today we are going to be putting this myth to rest and giving you the fire and energy to go and get out of that overwhelmed funk! Okay? Great! We’ll be talking about how to interact with resources and content in an effective way and connect the dots between your to-do list and the strategies you hear about. We implore you again and again to take action, a constant reminder throughout the episode, so take heed! And don’t worry, we also get into how we have slipped up in these ways over the past year and talk about some of the missteps we took in this regard. An important takeaway is the idea of co-working and accountability groups, something we have used — especially when starting out — to great effect. We finish off the chat thinking about ways to simplify your business and identifying your KPIs and critical numbers. So let’s get right into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have a great episode for you and one that is a little out of the ordinary. We are chatting to Kinzie Ferguson who is a boudoir photographer and a great friend of ours too! This conversation is going to be all about how Kinzie recently manifested her dream studio space and the process that allowed her to do it. This was a big deal for her and the experience really drove home some things that Kinzie believes in. We will also be chatting about how Kinzie goes about empowering people and her philosophy towards compliments, positivity, and intentionality. It was recently Kinzie’s birthday and we decided pretty spontaneously to have this conversation at her party! This episode has it all, we talk about the importance of hard work and family, intentionality and just serving your people as best you can. We are going to getting kind of woo today, which is something we have been wanting to do for a while and this was the perfect excuse. We will be talking tarot readings, birth charts, the moon, and more. So get strapped in, we are going deep! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guess what’s happening today? It’s the start of the Boss Project Summit! Did you just fist-bump the air? Because we sure did! This is like the day before Christmas, the first day of school, the thing we’ve been waiting for and it’s finally here! It feels like this has been years in the making, even though we’ve only been working on it for a couple of months, and the lineup is just insane! If you don’t know what we’re talking about, pause right now and head over to the Boss Project Summit website to get your free ticket because it’s all starting today! If you’re brand new to the podcast and it’s your first day on the internet ever, we are going to give you a quick rundown of what the French toast we’re even talking about. The Boss Project Summit is 100% free to attend and we’ve got sessions ranging from how to write a professional email, to perfecting your brand, to be profitable, and more! So inside this episode, we are breaking down the highlights and themes for each day, which speakers to look out for, and how you can get your hands on the all-access pass to be able to watch the videos after the summit is over. So get your calendars ready, pencil in those must-see sessions, and let’s get this summit started! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast, where we give you the tools, tips, and tricks to get your biz hopping and popping! Today on the show we are joined by Michelle Evans who is going to talk us through her journey of giving up a secure, well-paid job at Microsoft to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams. This obviously has great relevance for most of us as we have either made the switch or would still like to. It is just a part of doing this thing that we do! Michelle now runs her own marketing company helping business owners achieve their dreams and coaching them towards the kind of success they hope for. In our conversation, we go through this all-important process and how it played out for Michelle. Her story is really inspiring and has lessons in it for all of us of following your own path and playing to your own strengths. We chat about what led up to the decision to leave and then the all important actions that Michelle took following her departure, which led to her paving her own way ever since. Michelle gives us some great strategy pointers and you are not going to want to miss those so stay tuned right to the end of the show! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are breaking it down and showing you the behind-the-scenes of the creation and the progress of our very first online virtual summit, The Boss Project Summit. The Summit will run for four full days from November 6th to the 9th, 2018. We have 40 different speakers, including keynotes and breakouts and we have divided each day into four themes throughout the summit. So as you can see, we have a ton of great stuff planned for ya’ll! Now before we jump into this episode and all the things that are happening, if you have yet to sign up, get your booty over to the Boss Project Summit website and sign up. It’s totally free and we are so excited for the 5,000 people who have already signed up! So if you want to hear about why we decided to do a summit and what lit the fire for us to take on this new project, you’re going to want to go back and listen to Episode 270. However, that episode is definitely not a prerequisite for jumping into this one, so let’s get started! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by one of our favorite people in the world, a real internet bestie and the Instagram King, Tyler J. McCall! Tyler is here to talk to us about his specialty, how to get Instagram working for you immediately. Of course, Instagram, like all social platforms is constantly evolving so Tyler will be talking about what the best strategies are right now, but also looking at some of the more timeless rules of the framework. Tyler has helped a huge amount of entrepreneurs (including us!) to grow their Instagram following and engagement through the lessons he teaches. For Tyler, it really is quite simple: if you follow a few easy rules, have fun, and bring your own personality to your account you really can’t go wrong! During our conversation, we cover some of the basics around content and captions and the move away from highly curated profiles. Tyler also stresses the importance of knowledge of your audience and how this informs your strategy. We get into the nitty-gritty of telling your brand’s story and how to convey this in an effective and engaging way as well as looking at the values that underscore everything that you post. One of the biggest recent developments on Instagram is obviously the Stories feature and Tyler breaks down some lessons for approaching that area and also reiterates just how important they are to your reach, engagement, and potential profits. Lastly, we cover some tips and ideas for personal versus business profiles and how to go about starting out on the platform for newbies. Jump in, it’s going to be a fun ride! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast all of you wonderful and beautiful biz unicorns! Today we will be talking about something extra special and exciting and something we have been looking forward to spilling the beans on for ages! This episode is going to be all about our upcoming Boss Project Summit, that we are hosting in November. Are you as excited as we are? Because we have never really been this excited before. Today we will be giving you a quick overview of what the summit will include, a little behind the scenes, and then we will drop down into some more details about the event. Sound good? We think so! We give you the how, the why, and the where because we know you are going to want to know it all! We talk about which speakers we are most excited about, but really we are pretty crazy about all of them, we get into the reasons why it has taken us this long to get around to making this dream a reality and we talk about the magical All Access Pass that is vital if you want to get the most out of the summit. It’s hard for us to express just how great this event is going to be, but if you know us and know what our business and podcast is about, imagine that to the nth degree and you are getting close! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast with your favorite business sisters! We have a great episode in store for you today in which we will be talking to our friend Parijat Deshpande about her experiences self-publishing an Amazon bestseller. Parijat is a high-risk pregnancy expert and decided to turn her work and wisdom into a book called Pregnancy Brain, which has quickly become a hit and is selling fast since it was published! We chat about what led to the writing and publishing of Pregnancy Brain and what that process was like, from start to finish. Parijat is a great example of someone taking their business and turning it into something else, namely a distributable and profitable outlet. This is one way that a one on one business can be scaled to create more revenue and reach. During our discussion, Parijat takes us through the lessons she learned over the last year and a half as she was able to very quickly move from deciding on creating the book to selling it. She really is an inspiration and we at TCC hope she can inspire you to reach your dreams and get your book out of your head and out into the world! We chat about editors, design choices, the writing process and the ups and downs of becoming an author. All things we know you are dying to hear about so without further ado, let’s jump right in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, you read that heading right! We feel like one of our dreams came true recently. We have been dying for physical products for God knows how long. Well, instead of developing our own products, which will probably happen at some point in the future, this feels like a major stepping stone in the right direction for us. We’re SUPER excited to announce it and we can’t wait to tell you all about it. We officially have our own online shop! You can literally go buy anything from there. It’s curated to have our most favorite items from the most important categories in our lives and it’s hosted on your favorite platform ever! If you want to screw this whole episode and rather go shop, you can — we won’t hold it against you! However, if you want to know more about it, listen up first and then you can go shop til you drop! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s episode of the Strategy Hour we have a very wonderful guest and conversation to share with all our listeners! We welcome Jennifer Mary of Apple and Pear Wardrobe and she is here to tell us all about how to curate your best wardrobe and the difference that it can make in your business and life in general. Funnily enough, Jennifer admits she is not the person who loves clothes more than anything, but she is obsessed with the difference they can make to our lives. At the end of the day, it’s all about what clothes mean to us and how they can make us feel. Because let’s face it, we perform much better when we are feeling good and we feel good when we look good, so really it’s quite a simple equation. We talk about compiling a great capsule wardrobe and decluttering your cupboard for a stress-free mind and less decision fatigue. We also get into how to really dress according to your needs and to make the right impression. Jennifer shows how you can easily increase your levels of productivity and happiness by just making a few changes to your dressing habits and looking the part. A big takeaway from the episode is the idea that you can make a statement wherever you are with how you dress before you even say anything and when you are showing up for you biz, you really want to show up in the right way! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever been stuck with ideas and you just didn’t know if they were right for you or how to put them into action? We’ve been getting tons of questions from you all out there, most of the question being along the lines of, “How do you guys know when a product or a launch is the right thing to do?” and “When do you reassess and change things and how do you actually know that something isn’t quite right?” We’re here today to tell you about our past experiences and how we got to figuring it all out. In our experience, we’ve always just kinda “did it” and generally made it happen. There haven’t been many ideas that have come up and ultimately didn’t end up being created. We’re digging into how we originally started and how we knew it was the right choice for us, where our heads were at along the process and what you can do turn your vision into daily actions. From idea to conception to sale, we’re giving you both parts of our system. Be sure to keep listening to find out more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to The Strategy Hour everybody we hope you are excited about today’s episode because we sure are! Today we are chatting with Haley Williams about selling a business when you realize that you might not love what you are doing. This is an experience Haley had with a project she had been running for the last seven years only a few months ago! This can obviously be quite a difficult process and that is what this chat is all about. Making tough choices that are the best for you. It took some time but Haley found the clarity she needed to feel good about her decision and has not looked back since. There are a number of choices that are available to us as business owners when these feelings arise. One of the options is to just shut down the business completely, which is quite drastic but is sometimes necessary. The second option is to think about changing the way you work and how the business runs and the last is to let go of it and have someone else buy and take care of it. The last of these is what Haley did and she found it was a lot about letting go of the identity she had come to correlate to her business and realizing that she was more than that part of herself. Even at TCC, we are also slowly finding our way through this dynamic and learning to value ourselves beyond the work we put into our jobs. So come along for this important journey and hopefully you can come out the side inspired and ready for any necessary changes. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast everybody! We are so happy to have you and can’t wait to share another batch of super useful biz info with our beautiful tribe. We thought it would be a good idea to let all of you know what our day to day work looks like and how we actually spend our time working. To do this we are going to look back a bit, and see how things started, what we did in the beginning and then run through the developments over the last few years and see how our processes have evolved. Sound good? We thought so! A lot of what a successful business is, is the day to day dealings and schedule and how you spend your time. If you can figure out effective planning and calendar solutions you are halfway to realizing your dreams, at least that’s what we have experienced. This podcast has been a great way of measuring our progress and we have plenty of old episodes that deal with related content so make sure you are all up to date on those! Today we’ll be delving into our separate schedules before joining forces in 2015, and then show how our relationship and partnership has continued to mold the way we work up until now. So without further ado, let’s get right into it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast all of you wonderful and beautiful business badasses! We are so excited about today’s show and believe us when we say it’s and extra special one. Our guest today is Alma Omeralovic, who we met a few months ago when Amanda Boleyn brought her out at a speaking event and she guided a group of us through a meditation. We both felt an instant affinity with her and immediately and excitedly asked if she would join us on the show for a taste of what her mediation practice has to offer. So today we have a 30 minute, uninterrupted meditation, guided by Alma, followed by a short discussion on our experiences and questions. Sounds great, don’t you think? This is an episode you may want to come back to a few times, depending on your needs. If you do not make it through all 30 minutes the first time, that’s okay, just go at your own pace. We recommend marking when the actual meditation starts in the audio so that you can skip directly to that part each time you would like to practice it. Another point we would like to make here, and something Alma mentions in our discussion, is that you do not have to have some perfect environment or situation to begin. We often might put off something like mediation because we do not have a perfectly serene, empty room, Alma says one of her favorite places to meditate is on the train or at the airport! So no excuses! Just try do as much as you can and see how you feel, it will definitely be a learning experience. So make yourself comfortable, find a gentle seat and keep an open mind. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey all you beautiful people! Welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about something that have we implemented recently that was a great help to us and it might just be something you can use too. We’ll be talking about community managers and what this role means, why it is different from a brand ambassador or a group moderator and why you might want to think about employing one. We have a big old free Facebook Group that is currently about 20k members strong. And then we have two paid, private communities and it is for these that we implemented this role of community manager.   We’ll be talking about what differentiates these positions and why both are useful in their separate iterations. As these groups and communities grow, they change and shift, like anything. We want to continue to make sure that we can provide for all the members in the best possible way. We want everyone to have a great experience and for this experience to continue to improve and progress as the members grow. So we heard from a couple friends about how they were using community managers and how useful they were finding it. At first we were a bit confused by the title but once we looked into it we thought it was worth a try and it most definitely was! We’ll be talking a bit about the application process for this and how we defined the role and we also somehow segue into a section on baby sling fashion. We promise it is on topic, kind of! Anyway, for all this and more let’s dive right in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you unsure of what you are doing or where you are going? We know the feeling! We want to talk about these things with you! On this episode of The Strategy Hour we are talking about the crippling effects of fear and anxiety. We are here to tell you that everyone feels these things at different times and you need to be kind to yourself when these scary feelings come around! It is the unknowingness and feeling unsure that makes it so unbearable most of the time. But if we can talk about and acknowledge what is going on maybe we can make some progress and take a little more control of our lives. Come on sister, we know you got this! Emylee feels that she has an unhealthy fixation on the amount of time she has left before she dies, something that can become overwhelming and paralyzing. This can stop her from achieving the exact goal that these fears arise out of, wanting to be impactful and do great things. She feels like she is not sure what do next and how to go about getting over these hurdles. Abagail, on the other hand, finds that she is stuck more in the present than on the future. She ends up settling for the dissatisfaction and inaction of not having any more to give and just wants to put her feet up and do nothing. We are sure all our listeners have all their own worries and concerns that effect them in different ways and we really feel for all of you and hope that this episode can be the beginning of some important conversations towards better managing these issues. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey all you wonderful Wonder Women! We have a super fun episode for you today where we will be talking about our experiences in volunteering and just how much we have benefited from these. Specifically, we will be going over the time both of us have spent in the Kansas City Junior League and the work we have been involved in there. As part of our general mission to help all of our amazing listeners find their power and move with strength through this world, we would highly recommend any type of volunteer work and have extra faith in the Junior League organization which has chapters all over the world. During this episode, we give some context to its work and how it operates. We chat about how many great things the organization has to offer, both to its recipients and participants. We then dive into some of the many lessons that we have learned over the last couple of years and Abagail shares her experiences working in partnership with the local animal shelter and anti-cruelty unit. This has been a particularly profound time for her and please excuse us if there are a few tears! Emylee also chats about her evolving position in the League and how trying new things has been such a rewarding process for her. We finish off by rounding up the multiple ways in which you and your business can grow through this type of involvement, a truly symbiotic relationship. So come with us and get inspired to help and grow! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast! We have a great episode in store for all of you biz unicorns that we think will be super helpful with a big part of everyone’s lives. Today we are going to be talking about communication, resolution, and how to have those difficult conversations that we all have to have sometimes. You know that when problems arise you have to deal with them in one way or another and that there are good ways and bad ways. Well, today we are going to be showing you one of the better ways to go about it. This episode was inspired by a speech by Sheila Heen from Harvard Law School that Abagail recently witnessed and needless to say, she was inspired. We hoped to pass on some of that inspiration to all our wonderful listeners so you can go out and be your best selves for the world! During our discussion Abagail leads us through some of the steps that Sheila outlined and we give some examples of what these steps can be from personal experiences. We talk about inner dialogue and intentionality and why certain attitudes lead to having the same fight over and over. We are really trying to help you find a better way to conflict resolution and the first part of that is definitely in the way you approach an issue. Abagail explains how stories play a huge role in the way we understand our own perspective and these stories that we tell ourselves often determine how a particular conversation will play out. We also offer some tips for more reading on the subject and look at the book that Emylee has been reading which is dealing with similar subject matter. Ultimately the message of this episode is to slow down and take some time to try and understand someone’s point of view rather than try and prove why you are right. We know! This can be difficult! But don’t you think the world would be better off with a little more understanding? We think so! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, all you wonderful entrepreneurial unicorns and biz badasses! We have a really kickass buddy on the show today to share some great information and inspiring stories. Please help us welcome Kyrsten Sherwood from Copper Kettle! Kyrsten is here to tell us about her experiences hosting virtual, online summits and hopefully help you to think how you could possibly do it in the future! Isn’t that fun? This episode will get you started on thinking about how you can set up and run your own events and there is a ton of valuable information for those interested. So if you have ever wondered about doing something like this you will love what Kyrsten has to say! We also believe that online events, like Kyrsten’s summit, are a great stepping stone to bigger, in-person events, so who knows what you could be achieving in next to no time! In our discussion, we look at the differences between these types of events and which parts of the online overlap with real-world hosting. Kyrsten gives us some insight into Copper Kettle’s business plan and how her virtual summit now fits into that. From there she takes us through some of the setup procedures and how you might go about getting ready for an event before talking about the monetization of free online video summits. You are not going to want to miss this one! We promise! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another special episode of The Strategy Hour everyone! We are doing another round of our favorite thing, Boss Talk! We are lucky enough to have Steph Crowder back with us for this and you know how much we love it when she is around. This week we are asking each other what the top three things we wish we could outsource are. That’s right strategists, what are those jobs that you want someone else to do because it’s not your thing, you’re bored of it or you just have better ways to spend your time now that you are a boss? As our business has grown we have found we need and want more and more of the day to day stuff handled by other professionals, so we can have space for the most important jobs and all the rest of the good things that life has to offer. This is one of the blessings of growing a business, you get to choose how it transforms and shape its future according to your instincts and needs. This conversation covers the most fantastical desires we have as well as the most mundane, don’t worry we didn’t skimp on the things we wish we could have just a little different! Come with us on this journey of wishes and wonderment and think about what you may like to outsource in your biz! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s episode of The Strategy Hour is dedicated to all of your wonderful questions! We opened up the opportunity on our Facebook Group and have compiled a few of the questions to answer on the podcast, so we hope you enjoy our answers! We like to have these sessions from time to time because we owe so much to all of you, our family, and what way better for giving back than a little bit of quality time, right? So why not dive right in with us as we go deep? During this discussion, we answer questions on dream businesses, meeting each other, pivoting careers, our hobbies, health, confidence, new businesses, calendars and much more. As usual we try to be as honest as possible and give you everything we’ve got, because we know how much that little push of inspiration or motivation can do to get you on the track to success. Some of the big takeaways from this episode are following your heart and finding your own path, being kind and peaceful to yourself in the face of disappointment, pushing through challenges and taking opportunities when they present themselves. These are strategies that have worked for us and we are sure they can work for you too! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody and welcome back to your favorite entrepreneurial podcast! On this edition of The Strategy Hour we have a very special guest in the form of Christine McAlister, founder of Life With Passion and author of the new book The Income Replacement Formula. Christine’s business is dedicated to helping hopeful entrepreneurs transition from their day jobs into owning the business of their dreams, and boy, do we love her for it! It is a challenge that almost all business owners have to face and doing it correctly can be so tricky, that’s why Christine’s service is so important! During the episode, we go over the steps that Christine lays out in her book and she details each step with enough to get you started and excited about this shift. We talk about mindset, marketing, visibility and much more that you are not going to want to miss! Our guest has one of the longest and most diverse lists of achievements we have ever seen, having been an Olympic broadcaster, horse mother, and raising service dogs, amongst other things. So do we even need to say how excited we are to have her here? We will anyway! The point of this episode is to start your journey to the point where you can quit the slog and start working on your passion full time, so jump right in and let’s get started! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the podcast all you beautiful business unicorns! Today we are doing the monthly round-up and recap of July and we’ll be looking forward to August, so jump on board with us as we take this fun ride. We will mostly be talking about the funnels we have implemented and these helpful changes that we made to our website that have continued to improve our engagement and sales. We will carry on implementing more funnels as time goes on but mapping these ones out and seeing the positive results has been so exciting that we could not resist sharing these successes with y’all! As our business has grown it has become more and more complex to understand and map the journey our customers and new visitors make within it. It is, as always, vitally important to have a handle on these dynamics and it is always exciting to understand what efforts yield results and where you may be able to improve. It’s so invigorating to see how these funnels impact our programs and we can’t wait to see the growth in sales continue into the future! At times reflecting like this can be a be tricky or difficult and we may not always give ourselves a fair review, but please remember how important it is! When we see the numbers and the contrasts across the last months, it makes it all worth it! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Strategy Hour Podcast all you beautiful creatures! We have a great show in store for you today which we cannot wait for you to hear. We have an extra special unicorn joining us in the form of Haley Burkhead and she is here to tell us all about her business and her company called Profit Planner. Now we say this all the time on the Strategy Hour, but it is worth repeating, your profits really should be your highest priority, the money is what drives your business and you need to put that in the front seat! In our chat with Haley, we talk all about the way in which she has laid out her planner and how it can massively improve the way all of you run your businesses! Haley has so much energy and so many great ideas that we know you will be able to use immediately and will probably make you want to dig deeper into your planning methods. Haley gives us the whole break down on how the different levels of her framework and how each of these levels supports the next. Plus it is so fun and inspiring that we are pretty darn sure that after this episode you will not be able to wait to get started on optimizing everything you do! Throughout the episode Haley gives us steady reminders to keep you eyes on the profit prize and let everything fall into place around that. Great advice and something we urge you all to take to heart! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you know that things need to change but have no idea what it means? Do you often get anxious, overwhelmed, and don’t have a clue what you want? Well, you’re not alone! This is a common season that every entrepreneur goes through at one point or another and it’s something that can happen over and over again. We specifically feel this around content; it’s a weird mix of feelings where we don’t know what we like and we’re not too sure of what we don’t like. It ends up being a ton of back and forth and ultimately we’re left feeling overwhelmed. In today’s episode, we’re tackling this head on! We are getting a peek into Emylee’s brain and talking about some of her experiences with anxiety. We’re discussing how to redefine what we want, recognize whether it’s even something we want to be saying yes to, and finding some of sort clarity amongst the chaos. If this sounds like you and something you might be going through, keep listening to hear more! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey amazing TCC tribe! We are so happy to welcome you back to another episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast. Today we have long time favorite and past guest Jessica Eley here to talk about how you can make the important shifts in your life to be able conquer anything and everything. Apart from being one of our “bestest” people in the world, Jessica is a verified badass and has loads of great stuff to share in this episode so you are not going to want to miss this one! We promise! We’ll be talking about finding points of resistance and ease, how to build up your confidence and basically tearing your life apart so you can build it all up again, stronger and better than ever. Make sure to stay tuned to the very end as we will be making an extra special announcement about an offer you can take advantage of! But before we get there we will be having the type of conversation in which we wish all our listeners will be able to participate. Open, honest and self aware, these are the qualities that are going to take you from where you are now to where you want to be! We talk about that elephant that we find to be in the room just a little too much, this idea that if you are struggling with something you can just pour more money into it and then hope that some change will just miraculously happen. This episode is all about how you can do better by using your potential and taking action! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody and welcome back to The Strategy Hour! We hope you’re as excited for today’s episode as we are because we have something special for your earbuds that we know you are going to love. Today we will be talking about email welcome sequences and how to do them right. It took us some time and few missteps to get our’s where it is today and we are happy to share all the blunders we made with you for you and your business’ benefit! We want to help you get your welcome sequence just right for your needs and most importantly to make it profitable, so buckle up! During this discussion, we’ll be guiding you through our history with our email tools and ideas and showing all our listeners just what worked and what didn’t. And at the end of the chat, we will be sharing something extra special that can take you one step further in your marketing so make sure to listen out for that. We cover the purpose and reasons for having a welcome sequence that is the bomb, we also do a deep dive on why our first welcome sequence was so bad! Imagine that! From there we share some of the reasons why it can be so difficult to get this right, especially in the beginning and we finish off by emphasizing what you should be focussing on when you are putting your sequence together. So let’s get all the way in! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s show is an extra special one. In fact, it was so special that we had to rerelease to all of our listeners because it was too good for just one run! This was a chat we had a little while ago with our friend, fellow unicorn and amazing red-headed beauty, Courtney Foster-Donahue. Courtney Foster-Donahue is an Atlanta-based four-time entrepreneur, business strategist who specializes in video content creation and Facebook marketing and advertising. Courtney helps entrepreneurs to win using Facebook through her new program called FB Framework. The company was previously, and in some portions of this conversation, called FB Everything, just so you do not need to be confused between the two. With over 1.96 billion people around the world on Facebook today, why are so many businesses claiming Facebook is dead, turning away from Facebook Ads, or not seeing any benefits in them? From Facebook page optimization, your business Facebook page, Facebook ads, to all the tiny tips to get you maximizing your reach and growing your business, we are covering everything. This re-run busts the Facebook myths that will help you turn your business around! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Strategy Hour Podcast everyone! Today we have a very special and meaningful episode with a wonderful guest that we cannot wait to share with you. Her name is Aimee Beltran and she started her own business and podcast called Irresistible Icing. We are huge fans and cannot wait to hear what Aimee has to say! Our guest has struggled with weight and body issues since she can remember and she has turned this difficulty into a source of support and care though her company. She always felt she needed to get to this idea of the perfect body but after years of bad experiences and self destruction, she realized there were other ways to live the life she was dreaming of.  Aimee gives us the scoop on her five guiding principles that have helped her to start living an irresistible life. She takes us through these and gives us many other great insights and personal experiences. This episode is quite a deep one and we would like anyone with any history of body issues to be kind and caring to themselves while listening as we know these kinds of conversations can be very triggering. Nonetheless, there are some tears and lots of laughter during our chat and the overwhelming message that we and Aimee really want to bring to our listeners is one of body positivity and acceptance. And remember things do not always have to be perfect! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we’re talking The Kinda Crunchy Movement. You must be thinking, “What the french toast does this have to do with business?” Well, half jumping on a movement or half doing anything is freakin’ common and we think it only makes you human. But how can we identify those things and either make a decision that, it’s okay that you’re not going all the way or just decide that you want to make changes? Are you beating yourself up about some of the decisions you’re making or not making? Don’t worry, you’re not alone; We half-ass a lot of stuff! Now you’re thinking, “How does this relate to other parts of my life?” Today we’re identifying it and recognizing where we’re doing it and where we want to make changes for the better. The common highlighter we’re talking about is our own flaws and our own ways, because we aren’t quite full anything just yet. Also, there is power in calling stuff out on what it is, so let us call out all the bullshit that we still do and don’t do so maybe you can feel a bit more normal. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s episode we welcome wonder woman, super biz lady and all round badass Kit Cronk! Kit is part of our Think Creative Collective family and we love her entrepreneurial spirit as well. She is here today to tell us all about how she uses Redbubble and drop shipping for her business and how you might be able to do the same. Some of you may have heard of drop shipping but if you haven’t do not fear, all will be explained and become clear shortly! Kit has managed to come up with a great model for her particular artistic business and we cannot wait to have her share her expertise with you! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have been working our booty’s off behind the scenes trying to set up something pretty epic in our business – the evergreen machine. So, in this episode, we’re finally ready to tell you about the pros and cons of this soul-destroying process and why it is so worth it! We all talk about financial freedom, we all want it, but you don’t always hear about the nitty-gritty testing, the waiting, the endless funnels inside the funnels and the unsurmountable self-doubt it takes pushing through to get there. Despite the many cons of evergreening, we managed to maintain our sanity, not kill each other, stick it out and evergreen a $2000 course online. The benefits of this have been more than we ever dreamed, and we want to tell you all about it, and how you can do it too, here today. If you are a six-figure business owner and are interested in evergreening one of your courses, then we want you to pay attention to this episode – it could just change your life. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we welcome Amber Rae. Amber is an author, artist and speaker and has been called the “Millennial Motivator” by Fortune and "The Brené Brown of Wonder” by Mind Body Green. Amber’s work invites the truth that lives within us and helps you befriend your emotions and express your gifts. In this episode, we find out more about Amber’s new book titled, Choose Wonder Over Worry, where you’ll get a sneak peek into the book and some of Amber’s practices. These include: The Break Down Panic Attack, the Moving Across the Country to Change Your Life and the How You Actually Feel Your Feelings. We uncover a lot of techniques on how to deal with anxiety, worry, perfectionism and everything in between. Amber is here to help us let all that self-sabotaging sh*t go to live a better life – possibly our best life! If you want some action steps on how to make that happen, then this, right here, is the episode for you. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s Boss Talk question is: How do you think email marketing is changing due to new regulations? We all know the importance of email marketing, but the truth is that the state of email has changed a lot over the past few years and with the new data protection regulations, it is changing even more. Where is it headed and how are we going to have to adapt? Tackling this question here with us today, is our favorite regular, Steph Crowder. In this episode, we discuss the trending question, “Is email marketing dead?” and how you can make your emails stand out in a way that doesn’t make people kick you to their spam folder. We also discuss the power of in-person marketing, why talking to people like they’re human is the best tactic and how Abbie has been able to have a successful side business with no email marketing at all. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There tends to be this thing that happens. This thing that has been happening for a while now. This thing where everybody tries to implement the exact same strategy, at the same time. What then ends up happening is that everybody starts to look, sound and feel pretty much the same. Have you noticed it? This is where things start to get icky and this icky-ness is what we’re going to be bringing to the surface today. In this episode, we’ll be highlighting some of the common mistakes we see businesses making today. We’re here to help you cut the crap, stop following fickle trends and really get back to laying the foundations of basic business practice. Here we’ll be walking you through our PANCAKES Method to help you identify where you are at in your business and how you can reach those upper-level results. If you need a reality check, a kick in the booty and an actionable gameplan to ground your business for the long haul – then you’re going to love this episode. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Abbey Ashley, founder of The Virtual Savvy. Abbey is a virtual assistant startup coach who is helping women all over the world start their online businesses and launch and grow their VA businesses to $5,000 per month and beyond! Ashley has been featured on Boss Mom, Smart Passive Income and NBC News – so you can image, this girl knows her sh*t! If you’re someone who can’t stand the 9-5 life, being a VA is a great place to start for anyone who is wanting to get their feet wet in the online world. But how do you get started? For anyone who is stuck, not knowing where or how to even begin tapping into the online VA space, then this is literally the episode for you. In this episode, Abbey provides so many fantastic ideas for you to get something off the ground as well as how to pivot, niche and scale your VA business so that you can totally crush it. After listening to this episode, you will be able to start making money this very week! So, take some notes and let’s get started. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

June was the most slap in the face lesson that Emylee has ever had in business. Abbie, on the other hand, felt like we had it coming. But no matter which way you see it, we’re going to talk about it – and many other delicious things – today in our June Review episode. This June, we launched The Strategy Academy live for the first time since November 2017. We have evergreened the program for the past six months and this launch was to give us a big public push. We did a successful live launch but did not reach the goals that we had set for it. In this episode, we reflect on the process and the results of our Strategy Academy relaunch and highlight some of the latest changes and additions to TCC. We have some exciting things coming up for July, which we’ll share with you too, and round things off with some strategy, pancakes, and spaghetti. By end of this episode, you’ll be reminded that sometimes you don’t need to burn your projects but rather, speak about them in a different way. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Michelle Knight – mother, wife, world traveler and storyteller. Michelle is also a branding coach and the founder of Brand Merry, where she works with female entrepreneurs to create an authentic, captivating and money-making brand through the power of story. Today we are breaking down the different types of stories that Michelle sees as most effective in the online space, as well as how you can literally integrate yourself, your background, your purpose and all the little stories that make you an amazing human being – into your brand. Michelle shares some tricks, tips, and tactics on how you can outline really big stories, break them down, share them authentically and how to truly draw a connection between your audience so that you can build trust – which in turn, builds sales and a money-making business! This episode is really actionable and is going to spark a ton of ideas for you and your business. Everyone has a story to tell, right? So grab a notebook and start brainstorming yours here with us today. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today’s episode of The Strategy Hour we are tackling a very important subject and a problem that is very close to home for most business owners including ourselves here at TCC. We are going to be looking at the two schools of thought that might be holding up your business’ progress. With the rise in entrepreneurship and self-made business owners, their has been a natural growth in literature and thought on the subject. So much of this has been helpful and inspiring in many different ways but there are also ways in which it can be stunting you and your work. The first popular school of thought we look at is the “hustle ‘till you die” attitude which has been popularized by many successful entrepreneurs and has so much influence over the way go-getters portray themselves at events and online. We at Think Creative Collective know the value of hard work and persistence but attaching someone else’s or a collectively held image of blood sweat and tears to your own life can have devastating effects on your health, family life and of course your work. The second thing we look at is the idea that hiring and outsourcing is the direct line to success and credibility. After unpacking just how damaging these two ideas can be to you and those around you we look at ways in which you can avoid these problems, taking only the necessary pearls of wisdom from the philosophies and finding your own, healthy pathway to success! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Brit Kolo of Jam Marketing Group. Brit is a feel-good Marketing Coach, accountability partner, abundance junkie and hugger of all things plants. Brit coaches boxed-in business owners to become independent, profitable leaders through self-awareness and #MarketingThatFeelsGood. In this episode, we’re diving into all things personality type and this corresponds to marketing plans. Brit believes that you shouldn’t have to feel fake and sales-y in order to grow your business. By knowing your personality type and using that as a home base for your marketing strategy, she believes that you can truly create marketing that feels good for you. Here we break down what types of things feel good for certain personalities and what things might make us feel icky and uncomfortable so that you can lean into the thing that is going to help you market faster, better and stronger. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a good sense of how you can make selling feel so right for you in your business. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s podcast is really special retrospective, looking back on our meetaversary! We met three years ago and those of you who have been with us for a while, know just how special the journey we have made together has been! So we thought we would take this opportunity to look back on the last three years and really just pay tribute to each other and what we have achieved. Although it has not all been plain sailing and easy terrain the good times have made the challenges that much more manageable. Through all the ups and downs that life has thrown at us, this business we have built together is a blessing and we are both so grateful for it! We start by trying to remember exactly how we first met and the first conversations we in the Savvy Community and the following phone calls and sleepovers. Once we spent time together we knew it was something special and the honesty we were able to exercise so quickly really showed us how rare our connection was. Very soon after meeting we started to see how we balanced each other out and complimented each other’s strengths and weakness. We hope everyone out there gets to feel this great feeling! We look back at some of the best and worst memories from this period and look forward to what the future might hold. This episode is a bit gushy and is all about us - but we know you care, otherwise, you wouldn’t be here! And who doesn’t need a little bit more inspirations and gratefulness in their lives? Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we welcome Lauren Golden. Lauren loves helping mamas free themselves from the nine to five grind. Lauren launched The Free Mama Movement to show working moms that they don’t have to choose between family and financial stability. We’ve all said it and we’ve all heard it: “I don’t have time.” This is the easiest excuse that people love to pull out of their pockets when they’re not seeing business growth or success. But is it really true? For every single person out there who has ever said, “But I don’t have any time to grow my business” – this episode is for you. Here, Lauren is busting myths, knocking excuses out the window and giving you action steps on how to better utilize the time that you do have in your day – regardless of kids, dogs, full-time jobs, health, hobbies and life. All this so you can make amazing things happen in your business. No more excuses – grab your notebook and give this one a listen! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey ya’ll! It’s our May review / June planning session coming to you live from Emylee’s very dirty office. In this episode, we go over some of the things we accomplished and didn’t accomplish in May, some of our daring plans for June and let you in on a little big secret… This June we will be bringing you the biggest launch you have ever witnessed at TCC and share some of our exciting new sponsorship prospects on the horizon. We also share some successful news from our grueling switch over to Active Campaign and reveal why we deleted 21k subscribers from our list and are as cool as cucumbers about it. We also share the changes we have made to the business with GDPR compliance and why vanity numbers really don’t mean a thing. By the end of this episode, you will have a few great resources to help you take the steps you need to take in your business in order to reach success and sustainability. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome back Steph Crowder. Steph is so awesome, that we decided she needed to become a regular! So here she is, to talk about keeping your to-do list alive once you’ve lost momentum in your business. After the hype of a launch has died down, losing momentum is common. Trust us, we know! There is a certain amount of adrenaline that keeps you going during a launch that keeps you alert, that keeps you firing when you’re in that challenge mode. But what do you do after this frenzy subsides? A lot of us go back to the same old habits and the same old routines and this is where a lot of us get super unproductive. Steph has found that there are 7 major reasons why your to-do list is not getting done. If you are one of those people who are like, “What the hell? It’s Friday and I’ve crossed off barely anything on my to-do list!” Then girl, this episode is for you. Here, Steph talks about the big commonalities she has seen for why people aren’t getting their shit done. Better yet, she gives us actionable steps we can take toward more productivity and sustainable momentum. After this episode, you will be able to take a deep breath, re-evaluate your time, kick that self-doubt to the curb and be the boss lady you’ve always dreamed of being. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For those of you who missed the last Boss Talk Series episode, we brought Steph Crowder of Courage & Clarity on and everybody loved it! We got such good feedback, that we decided to bring her on again. Yep, she’s officially moved in! So today’s question is, how do you maintain healthy female relationships? We’ve touched on this in previous episodes, but today we want to focus specifically on business female friendships. This is a tricky topic and goes hand in hand with the theme: Community VS Competition. So how do you stay in your lane and be friends with someone who is doing what you’re doing? When are you crossing the line of taking advantage of a friendship? And how do you know whether your own helpfulness is being taken advantage of too? These are the types of tough questions we’ll be digging into in this episode. We also share how we personally manage our business female friendships and how having the support of other business women has radically enhanced our lives and careers. By the end of this episode, you’ll really see the benefits of having business female friendships in your life and will know how to determine whether these friendships are in a healthy give-and-take balance. No more hiding, it’s time to get out there and take a chance on the women in your midst. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show, we welcome Mia "Maya" Scharphie – creative career coach, designer, and agent of change. Mia founded Build Yourself to help women in creative fields move past the obstacles that hold them back in in their careers. This episode goes hand-in-hand with the previous few conversations we have been having on the podcast around competition versus community and what empowering women really looks like. Through Mia’s Build Yourself program, services, workshops and courses, she helps women to build confidence in their work and in their work environments – assisting them with practical things such as asking for a raise or a promotion, negotiating better and lead a healthier work-life balance. Mia also helps women understand and control their inner-critic and become comfortable with the fear of rejection and the heavily-weighted “No’s” that none of us want to receive. Mia also encourages us to find a wing woman and leverage the power of the women in our lives today. In this episode, we unpack our thoughts on empowering women and how we can make the changes necessary to tackle our self-sabotaging thoughts. Mia gives some really great, practical new routines and habits that you can start implementing in your life to see these changes and unlock the power of your own gifts. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ya’ll know that we’re into some woo-woo shit. A big chunk of that woo-woo shit is essential oils – which we know you’ve already heard us talk about. But we have a whole lot of other woo-woo things that we do in our daily lives. Things like DIY cupping, getting Chinese foot massages, wearing crystals in our bra’s and going on family excursions to The Stinky Store. In this episode, we take you through an entertaining list of ten woo-woo things that make our lives better, that make us better, and in turn, make our business better. In their own unique ways, these things help us to destress. They help us to keep our energy and our chakras in check. And ultimately, they keep us sane and weird, at the same time. So, if you’re looking for some tips, resources and advice on a few small things you can add to your daily life – then you’ve come to the right place. Come and take a look into our crystal ball and get woo with us – we know you want to! [Sexy radio voice]. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Jen Miller. Jen is a brand strategy consultant and is super pumped about helping women build their brands. In 2003 Jen also started a blog, interviewing female founders to discover how she might be able to build a brand of her own. Jen has learned from the best and the proof is in the pudding! Jen is really great at helping entrepreneurs ask themselves the right questions; questions that will help them lay the foundation of their brand and get them headed on the right path from day one. In this episode, we are talking about the importance of brand personality and how it is so much more than just your logo, your color scheme, and your website. We’re also talking about how you can take care of people in a way that serves your brand well, how to put yourself out there, dressing the part and being a little vulnerable in your own self. At the end of the day, it boils down to authenticity. But authenticity with intention. So, whether you’re starting a brand from ground zero or trying to get your brand back on track, by the end of this episode, you’ll have some awesome tools to get you going with a bang. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you missed our 5 Days to Launch episode (#68), way back when, chances are you’ve been sitting on your launch ideas since then! This is why we’ve decided to bring the 5 Days To Launch Challenge episode back to get your booty in gear once and for all. Word on the street is, you have some pretty bomb ideas but for whatever reason, you just keep them in your pocket, you sit on them, you hold onto them, and you don’t launch them. What the heck? What are you waiting for, lady? There is a valuable opportunity there that can earn you some real cash dollar bills for your business. So many of you come to us saying that you have this amazing dreamy idea, but you are frozen, you are stuck, and you are on the fence. A lot of you live in Sitting-on-the-fence-ville, right? But the reality of it all is, it is not comfortable or really beneficial for anyone. We want to help you to get into the launch mindset and this is why we created the 5 Days to Launch Challenge to arm you with the strategies and the steps you need to get there. We have determined that launching something and launching it well really just comes down to five steps. That’s it. Five steps. And we’re here to remind you what those steps are with a repeat one of most valuable episode to-date. You can do one step a day and at the end of five days, you will have launched a product and made actual money. So, if you missed it the first time ‘round or are new to the show, get ready to jump into your very own launch by signing up for the challenge today! No excuses. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Brooke Genn. Brooke is a writer, a photographer, podcast host and one part of a power couple together with her husband, Wilhelm. Brooke has had a really interesting and eclectic past and today works full-time with her spouse, building a business together as well as building a tiny home on wheels. In this episode, we are talking about what it takes to be a power couple. We get into the steps Brooke and her husband took to get her husband to come home and work with her full-time and how they are able to travel the world together and do exactly what they’ve always wanted. We find out what Brooke has learned from working with her husband and how they have navigated this transition, navigated having their own independence and navigated what it takes to run a business when you and your partner are so emotionally tied. A lot of us have thought on and off about working with our spouses but Brooke and her husband are actually doing it successfully! There is a lot to be learned from this episode about business and about relationships… even if you aren’t working together. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show, we are talking about money mindsets. Figuring out your own relationship with money takes a long time. How do you know when you’re over-spending? How do you know when you’re being too frugal? What are the thoughts and emotions that control your spending and how do you get over your deeply engrained money blocks? As women, we are taught that being financially successful, is something to fear. It might sound silly, but it’s the truth! So much of our decision making is fear-based and so often we don’t recognize this as fear. These are the sorts of questions and topics we’ll be chatting through in this episode today. We’ll be referring to our own experience, our own money blocks and be giving you a few questions that you need to be asking yourself in order to break free from the shackles of your bank balance! By the end of this episode, you will be more conscious of your own money mindset, have a foundation from which to tackle it and feel empowered to make the changes you need to make toward a more healthy and happy (financial) life. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast we welcome the wonderful, the magnificent, the powerhouse, Erin Kelly! Erin is here to talk to us about MemberVault, something we are more than excited about. We’ll be hearing about how MemberVault uses gamification as way to boost your business and increase your revenue. Erin will be starting from the very beginning and explaining exactly what MemberVault does and what gamification actually means, so if any of this sounds new and a little daunting, don’t worry because we have you covered! During our discussion, you’ll get everything you need to know about the great service that MemberVault provides and how you might be able to incorporate it into your strategy. By incentivizing, tracking and tagging, MemberVault enables businesses to tailor and curate their communications and offers to their audiences that are proven to increase results. Sound good? We thought so! The most exciting part of it all is how the service actually cuts down on your workload and allows many automated actions to occur, so you will be getting more interaction for less time spent, and if that isn’t the ticket, we do not know what is. So stay tuned as Erin helps us break it all down for your listening pleasure. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been getting a lot of questions from our community recently about how the heck we stay friends, even though we’re business partners. So, what does our relationship look like and how do we maintain friends outside of our business circle at TCC? Well girl, “It’s complicated,” and this is why we’ll be tackling questions around our own friendship and our friendships with others in this episode. As any business owners knows, it can be a challenge to maintain friendships with people who don’t really understand what you do. People drift apart, lives change and these days, we just move in so many different directions! So how do you make new friends (without being awkward about it) and how do you know when a friendship is just not working anymore? We’ll just be chatting this topic out and sharing how these dynamics ebb and flow in our own lives. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a few tips that you can use to help maintain (or sever) your own relationships. Because the truth is, we all get by with a little help from our friends, but you have to get out of your comfort zone to make them and sustain them. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast, we welcome our latest internet crush, Chris Davis. Chris is the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign and is an email marketing genius. With everything going on in your business, the truth is, you need to take your email marketing seriously. Chris has helped us so much in getting our email marketing strategy off the ground and quickly soaring. He is an incredible resource, and in this episode, we get really deep into discovering information out about your customers, as well as some of the basic mindsets you need to be in when you’re starting your email marketing game. Chris uses a ton of analogies to break this information down in a way that is easily digestible for newcomers and old times alike. We discuss how to personalize your emails, the benefit of multiple marketing platforms and a few key tips for using the ActiveCampaign platform. If you are about to tackle your own email strategy, this episode will really help you to dive in with the right mindset. And if you already have an email marketing strategy set up and sailing, there is information in this episode that will get you to reconsider, adapt and improve it. If you are just stuck or overwhelmed, in any shape or form, about your strategies – this episode is here to help you reset that mentality, help you move forward and get your audience through the door. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are welcoming you to a brand new series that we are kicking off right here, right now! The monthly series is called Boss Talk and it’s an unscripted, uncensored, roundtable, brainstorming session between Abbie, Emylee and our lovely visiting guests. We’ll be diving into hot topics in the industry right now and will kick off every episode by posing a question to each of us in the discussion, which we’ll flesh out throughout the show. Today’s question is, “What are your thoughts on the phrase "community over competition?" And here to help us answer it, is the delightful boss babe, Steph Crowder of Courage & Clarity. Here in this series, there is no holding back, no sugar-coating, no censoring. It’s just us, cracking open beers and navigating important questions that you’re probably wondering about too… So, are you someone who is all for community, or all for competition? Or is it about striking a healthy balance between the two? But how do we do that and are authentic communities really possible? This is an important and topical debate across all industries right now and one that we’re not sure people are speaking about as honestly as openly as we’d like. This series is all about real, off-the-cuff, honest opinions and if that’s your jam, then come and join us! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Josh Stanton. Josh is the co-founder of Screw The Nine To Five, which is him and his wife, Jill’s, slice of the internet where they help entrepreneurs build more attention to their brands, make more money in their business and get more out of their life through simple strategies, how to’s and behind-the-scenes glimpses into the realities of building a business online. In this episode, we tackle the topic of how to create a highly engaged Facebook group. We’re here today to let you in on a little secret and that is that Facebook member numbers is kind of a load of BS if you don’t have engagement! But how do you cultivate engagement, and better yet sustain it, from the get-go? Josh lets us in on their tips, tricks, and processes that have helped him and Jill create a successful, highly engaged and empowered Facebook group that actually drives members to sales. All done in as little as thirty minutes a week! We discuss how to show up for your people personally, how to drive them to your products or services, how to set group rules and expectations and how to keep your page alive and buzzing with content, questions and resources that impact the community you are serving. If you are looking to step up your Facebook game and create a thriving community – then this is the episode to fill up your notepad up with! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we discuss what has happened this year, outside of business. So personal development, things we’ve been focusing on in our personal lives, the things we’ve been doing, the books we’ve been reading, what we need, what we want, what we like and ultimately, how we’ve been trying to grow as individuals. For the first time in a long time, we have taken a small step away from the goals of the business and worked on identifying where our heads are at, who we are as people and what our personal goals are. We decided to tackle our personal development ahead of the game, i.e before the business became all-consuming and everything in our lives was falling apart! Nothing in our personal lives up until this point has been necessarily broken, but we just realized that, hey, things could be better! We think that a lot of you listening out there might really identify with what we’ve been going through in our personal lives and this episode is here to offer you some helpful resources and to let you know that girl, you are not alone! In this episode, we’ll be discussing who we are and who we want to be outside of work and why life is not just a bunch of boxes you can tick. We also discuss the weight of societal expectations we’ve experienced, especially as women, and how we are working to love ourselves a little more. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Kate Boyd. Kate is the Founder of Cobblestone Creative Co and does this girlfriend know conversions! After raising seven figures in revenue for a non-profit organization through powerful messaging, copywriting and marketing she started her own business that helps build more creativity and genuine connection to the digital marketing space. In just three years she has built three profitable online businesses and created live and automated sales and marketing experiences that convert up to five times the normal rates! Kate is a serious conversion expert and in this episode, she shares a lot of helpful tools, tricks, and resources for you to use for an upcoming launch or perhaps to help you analyze an “unsuccessful” launch that you’ve had in the past. We are talking all about increasing conversions and humanizing your launch so that people trust you more and feel more involved. We discuss how you are priming your audience, how you are getting their mindsets ready for the sale and how to have an aspect of personal outreach included in your automated strategies in order to make your next launch even more powerful. Grab your notebook and be on the lookout because we might be trying out some of these tactics for our next launch… and you can too! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alright, it’s the episode you’ve all been waiting for. We are finally ready to talk about the biggest change we’ve made in TCC in a long time. We’ve moved email service providers… TWICE and we spoke about this is in our monthly review for April but promised we would break it all down into an episode all of its own. So here it is. Today we are run through the reason why we switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit, and then switched again from ConvertKit to Infusionsoft and then again from Infusionsoft to ActiveCampaign. Complexities aside, what we really want this episode to do is serve as an educational resource for you if you are needing help deciding between two platforms.   So in this episode, we will be diving into why certain platforms just didn’t work, as well as the key reasons that made us sway to ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign. We walk you through various system features of the platforms, like ConvertKit’s tagging-based system versus ActiveCampaign’s automation-based system and how these worked for us. We also get into the nitty-gritty’s of how integrations, deep integrations, and visual automation work in ConvertKit as well as in ActiveCampaign and how we were able to find out so much more about our customers using certain features. No matter what service provider you choose, at the end of the day you should always pick what feels right for you and your business. We hope that this episode will help you to make a more informed choice and get you a step closer to being a turbo-boss babe! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have very few business crushes in this world, but Jill Donovan of Rustic Cuff is definitely one of them. In this episode, Jill talks to us about how she was publicly humiliated on national television, sitting on the couch next to Oprah. This moment, which Jill will go on to explain, drastically changed her life. We hear how she was able to move on after this incident and turn it around into the best thing that could have ever happened to her. We learn more about how Jill scaled her product-based business called Rustic Cuff, where she makes and sells beautiful bracelets and encourages the spirit of giving. Jill started out giving away her cuffs to strangers at the local grocery store and today, Rustic Cuffs has over 160 employees and strong social media community of over 70,000 people. Jill’s designs are being worn by big celebrities today and through her business, she is showing others how they can make a difference to the lives of others. Jill is someone who has been guided a lot by her intuition. But how do you know when you’re following it? In this episode, Jill also gives us some great tips for listening to your heart and finding what it is you excel at. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are doing our monthly review for April 2018. Our monthly review is a popular episode that we do every month. In the past, we have gone into a lot of depth with all of our numbers and our tracking. However, we have decided to narrow it down a little bit to be a more of an overview. If you want all the nitty-gritty’s, you can find them inside The Goal Crusher Club. In the episode, we are a little goofy because well, April was crazy! We just got back from a week-long trip to Chicago for the She Did It Her Way Summit. We did some strategizing in our hotel room (which we covered in post-it notes and crazy-lady handwriting) and will be reporting back on our plans and goals for the future. We’ll also be discussing our experience switching email providers (again) from Infusion Soft to ActiveCampaign, as well as how we got 100 members into the Goal Crusher Club through some darn fine teamwork. In addition to that, we get into some deeper identity crises we’ve been experiencing in our business and the “Aha” moment in Chicago that reminded us that the destination is the journey. Our biggest glory moment this month has been the positive shifts we have seen in our team and how we have come to learn that teamwork takes, well, so much work. Work that is so worth it! We end off this episode with some good ol’ fashion funnel talk and our improvements to work toward for next month. We hope this episode will inspire you to keep going, even if you don’t have it all figured out yet. We sure don’t, but hey, we’re enjoying the ride. Bring it on May! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we welcome Justine Nelson. Justine is a friend and previous co-worker who embarked on a personal journey to get rid of debt… and then decided to teach other people how to do it too. Justine is the founder of Debt Free Millennials, an online resource blog and coaching center helping thousands of millennials ditch debt and live like a boss. Today we are speaking about all the fun things – like student loans, debt culture and budgeting. We are also going to be discussing how to navigate conversations around debt with your partner and family and how having a budget and goals in your personal life leads to amazing things in your business life. We hear how this Midwest millennial got into debt in the first place, how she broke out of debt's chains and was able to start a business from the ground up and do things in her life that she never even imagined. Since Justine has been in the dark pits of debt herself, she is a really great person to get some tips and advice from on how to cope with these financial practicalities, as well as the emotional strain that debt can place on your relationships. If you are feeling overwhelmed by your own debt, honestly, Justine is going to show you just how doable (and surprisingly fun) paying off your debt can be. If you want to live that debt-free life and grow the business you have always dreamed of growing, then this inspirational episode is a great place to start! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to part 5 of the Goal Crusher Club series! Well done for making it this far. We hope you’ve learned a ton and are ready to identify everything you’ve been doing wrong! In this episode, we are going to be looking at the three major things you are definitely doing wrong when it comes to setting your goals. Wondering how we know you’re doing these things wrong? Well, because we did them too! This episode isn’t about dogging you and we’re not necessarily saying that some of these things can’t work, but in order to not only reach your goals but fly past them, we want you to take these things into account. In this episode, we will be discussing the three most commonly made mistakes that prevent a lot of us from reaching our goals. 1) Picking “buy work” goals. 2) Paying your way as the only way and 3) Hiring people to fix what’s broken. We’re going to explain why these things don’t work and what you could do instead. Ultimately, we want you to get to know your business before you add on or distract yourself with ventures that are sure to veer you off course. We’re here to help you skip the hurdles and the mistakes that we’ve already made, so if you’re looking for a faster and more thorough route to your goals – then take a listen to this episode. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we welcome Dr. Rachel L. Alan. Dr. Rachel is a licensed clinical psychologist with over a decade of experience supporting people to take inspired action to connect to self-discovery. She focuses on healing, cultivating healthy habits and enhancing self-wellness, balance and living life passionately. This episode is pretty close to an actual therapy session for us! But we know that so many of you out there struggle with these types of issues too and will be able to relate in one way or another. Health and wellness is something we speak about a lot on the show, given the challenges we have had had with our own health and wellness – physically, emotionally and mentally. Today we dive into some of the common choices that a lot of us out there make around food and setting boundaries, especially as women business owners. If you are struggling with setting boundaries with yourself and with others, or with under-eating, over-eating, binge eating, snacking and are just trying to get your life in balance, we think you will find this episode really beneficial. These often deeply ingrained habits can leak into our business and into our personal lives and we need to question the root of our unhealthy habits before we can even begin to create healthier new ones. It’s important to know that you are not alone out there and taking a listen to this episode might just be the step you need to take toward having more control in your life! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Part 4 of the Goal Crusher Club Series! Today we are talking about one of Abbie’s favorite things on the planet – creating Key Performance Indicators in your business, otherwise known as KPI’s. We will be walking you through some of the things you need to be tracking on a month to month basis that will genuinely help you realize the health and wellness of your business and exactly what you need to be paying attention to. KPI’s are going to give you all the knowledge you need about where you should be spending your time; what needs more babying and perhaps what needs to be cut. If you aren’t tracking these things you may never be able to recognize what might be an issue in your business, or which aspect of your business you need to grow. This leaves you guessing over and over again and this is not where you want to be! Ultimately, it comes down to performance and numbers and this is where identifying your KPI’s come in! In this episode, we are going to get you tracking like you’re on safari. We’re going to be explaining exactly how to track your data over a launch period and show you exactly how to calculate your earnings per lead, your cost per lead and the additional numbers you should be paying attention to. We are also going to be showing you how to analyze your monthly data; including your most popular posts and your most engaged customer and how you can use them to propel your business forward with confidence. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we welcome husband and wife business duo, Ben and Laura Harrison, of Jonas Paul Eyewear. This episode is for anyone who has ever been afraid to go after that seemingly unattainable business or their passion project. A lot of us let those things sit on the shelf gathering dust because they seem, well, really hard and really scary! Ben and Laura are two people who are really living what a lot of people only dream of creating. In 2013, Ben and Laura gave birth to their son, Jonas Paul. Jonas was born with a rare disorder, Peter’s Anomaly. As Ben and Laura searched for fashionable eyeglasses for their visually impaired son, they grew increasingly frustrated at the limited (and very un-trendy) options for children. They were so inspired by their son, that they decided to leave their careers to launch Jonas Paul Eyewear with the mission of helping children feel beautiful in their glasses and providing sight to children in need with every purchase. Laura and Ben saw a gap in the market, combined their skills and followed their passions and their need to make a difference in the world to create a unique and impactful business. In this episode, we’ll be diving deeper into how their business came about, the challenges they faced along the way and how they transitioned from a service based business in wedding photography to a product based business in eye care! Ben and Laura have a truly inspiring story and if you have an idea you’ve been wanting to get off the ground – trust us, you’ll have all the motivation you need after this episode. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the show we are going back in time to an old episode. Our schedules were jam-packed this past week — speaking at a conference in Chicago for She Did It Her Way, and having our massive strategy planning session for the rest of the year and our future — so we didn’t get to record another episode of the Goal Crusher Series. However, we think you will enjoy this episode because it is definitely an oldie, but a goodie! It is all about chasing those sparkly squirrels, what to do, and what questions to ask yourself when those sparkly squirrels pop up, as they always do! Most creatives seem to also be known as “serial entrepreneurs” because we’re constantly thinking of new ideas and wanting to try them out. Although this keeps us innovative in business, it can also paralyze us and hold us back. Inside this episode, we go through how you can stay on track or maybe get distracted intentionally to help grow your business. We’re getting you focused and making you ask the hard questions before you dive into something unknown or add on something new to what you already have to offer. So jump into this episode as we get some clarity up in here! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the podcast we have Molly Stillman. Molly is the founder and creator of Still Being Molly, a lifestyle blog that has been around since 2007, and the host of the Business with Purpose podcast. Molly had over 600,000 readers last year and she has become a trusted community for women, especially moms – covering everything from ethical style, clean beauty, real food, parenting, to serving your community and making the world a better place. We all have a purpose in life and one of life’s most challenging journey’s is discovering exactly what that purpose is. So many of us suffer from an identity crisis. We don’t know if we’re on the right path and we often don’t know who to turn to for wisdom and advice. Today, we delve into Molly’s personal story and what she went through on the discovery of finding her true purpose and her true people. Molly shares the rough journey she went through losing her mom in school and a lot of authentic, deep conversation around how you can start having your own self-realization and self-discovery. If you have lost a parent or your “person”, this might be a story to which you can really relate. Molly shares a lot of tools that you will find in this episode to help you do some of your own self-reflection, find you're deeper, “Why?” and how to apply that to into your life and business today. By the end of this episode, we’ll have you peeling back those onion layers to get to the core of your purpose... without crying. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Part Three of the Goal Crusher Club Series! Today on the podcast, we are talking about the fun side of business – getting paid! Woohoo! Getting paid should be an exciting and rewarding part of business; but who knew that it could be the cause of so much anxiety and confusion, right? We want to give you a little break here today and share with you what we have used in the past to help us define what to pay ourselves as business owners and how that works for us today since our business has grown. If you have severe anxiety around money, we totally understand the fear of not wanting to pay yourself. A lot of the time people are either afraid that that money is going to disappear, or that it is supposed to be allocated toward something else or are just simply feeling that they don’t deserve that money. This is something to be aware of going into this episode but for the most part, we are going to be diving into the different formulas that you can use in order to figure out what to pay yourself. We will also be discussing helpful tools to help you with payroll, saving for tax, saving for retirement, how to separate your income into different bank accounts and what determines a “reasonable” salary. Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices