business insights
A funnel is not a website. It’s not a single email. It’s not an overpriced software platform someone tried to sell you in a webinar. It’s the journey someone takes from “Who are you?” → “This is interesting...” → “I need this in my life” → “Take my money.”
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100 Profitable Digital Product Ideas
Plus, a totally free challenge to kick you into action and get this baby launched.
Service Providers Earning Less than $5k Per Month: Essential Skills You Need to Have a Successful Business
There’s undoubtedly a flood of information and resources on the internet for service providers looking to grow their income to $5k+ months. Unfortunately, that also means that it can be difficult to know where to look, what to search for that’ll actually be helpful, and find reliable resources. When you’re a smaller business, your number one priority is essentially increasing your revenue, and there are a number of skills that are essential to have in order to make that happen.
In this post, we’ll be giving you our best resources to help you hone in on those skills so that you can finally break free of the feast or famine mode that so many small service-based businesses find it hard to come out of in the beginning stages of business.
Maximizing Your Potential: Understand the Relationship Between Capacity and Business Goals
One of the largest issues we see in the service industry, specifically related to CEOs and their time, is that they aren’t aware of what their capacity is or how to best split their time to focus on all of the areas that need their attention. Without the knowledge of what baseline their capacity should cover (i.e. 20% in this area and 10% in another), they also aren’t able to see the clear path forward to reaching their goals. In this post, we’ll be breaking down how your time should be spent as a CEO and how to understand your capacity and its effects on your business goals.
How to Know When You Should Pivot or Start Over in Your Business
There comes a point in every service-based business owner’s journey (especially in this market) where they hit what feels like a huge cement wall. Leads feel harder to come by, prospects feel harder to close, and it seems the only way to get through it is to either demolish the wall or change directions. In this case, that would mean pivoting your offer or scrapping everything you’ve built and starting over.
How to Identify and Define Values That Your Business Can Actually Live In
Something we’ve noticed is overlooked by many new or growing business owners is creating brand values. You may think since your business is small or because you may not have a team, that means they aren’t important at the moment, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you want to ensure you’re developing a clear and concise brand, creating consistent brand awareness, and attracting the right kinds of clients and audience to your business, then you need to identify and define your brand values.
Roundup: 5 Must Have Templates to Help You Review Your Year in Business and Plan for 2023
The end of the year is possibly our most favorite season of business! It’s the time where you get to reflect on your year in business, assess your analytics and results, and plan for the year ahead. Because this is such a fun time for us, we love making sure our audience is equipped with the resources to help them make these things happen. In The Creative Template Shop, we drop so many helpful templates for reflection and new year planning.
With hundreds of templates to choose from, we wanted to do a quick round-up of our top 5 must-have templates to review your year in business and plan for 2023!
What You Need to Know About Client Acquisition in 2022
Client acquisition is likely the single-handed most asked about topic we get from our audience and members of our various communities. Lately, we’ve been hearing a common complaint from business owners that they need more leads. While there have been some market shifts recently, they’re not necessarily impacting the way we acquire clients. It may feel like it’s changing when actually, everything with clients is exactly the same.
Here’s the thing; marketing is cyclical. There are things that work now that aren’t going to work in 6 months, then in 2 years, those things could come right back around again. There will always be hotspots, but you shouldn’t rely on them if you want consistency. We have lots to talk about on this topic, so let’s dive in!
Hiring a Contractor Vs. Employee – What is the Difference
We know that getting ready to hire and actually going through the process can feel like an overwhelming mountain to climb. It feels like you have 1,287 things to learn about the intricacies of different positions, titles, types of hires, tasks, job descriptions, etc. But one of the first things that needs to be decided on first is - are you ready to hire a contractor or an employee?
Don’t worry. In this blog, we’re going to share our best hiring tips and clearly tell you the differences between hiring a contractor and an employee.
How to Build a Team that Allows You to Scale
Building a team is an incredibly powerful tool that will take you to the next level… that is, if you get it right. When it comes to hiring, the more you know, the more equipped you’ll be to face whatever comes your way. Over the years we’ve hired a slew of part-time contractors, contractors that felt like extensions of our team, part-time and full-time employees. We’ve literally hired ‘em all! Through all of that we’ve learned a lesson or 37 that we’d love to share with you.
Identify The Results You Want and Create a Profitable Offer
When you first started your business, you probably came up with your services and offers like you were throwing spaghetti at the wall. You were just hoping to get some customers and start making some money.
However, after some time goes by, hoping is something you no longer want to do. Usually as you become more established, you want a reliable form of income, you want dreamy clients, you want clear boundaries and you want steady growth.
Well, having spaghetti thrown services and offers isn’t going to get you there. If you’re not getting the spaghetti reference (lol), what I’m trying to say is that your offer needs to be clear, precise and profitable. And by getting that type of profitable offer you first need to identify the results you want AND to identify the results you want you need to go through a handful steps.
So, in today's blog, I’m going to walk you through how to strategically identify the results you want and how to create a profitable offer.
10 of Our Favorite Tools for Team Productivity & Communication
We love systems and tools (surprise, surprise). We’re always upgrading a process, trying out new tools that we think will benefit our team, and generally seeing what’s helpful and ends up sticking long-term. In doing so, we’ve accumulated a small staple collection of tools that massively benefit our team productivity and communication, which are two of the most important aspects of managing a team.
Stepping into our roles as not only managers but leaders, learning how members of our team work best, how they prefer to communicate, and ensuring that we have the necessary tools to aid in that has served us and our team members so well.
There are 10 tools that are our absolute couldn’t-live-without-them favorites, and we’re so excited to share them with you today! If you don’t adopt some of these exact tools for your team, hopefully the goal behind them inspires you to create something similar.
3 Reasons Why You Need a Business Coach (Even if You’re an Established Business)
We think hiring a business coach is one of the best decisions you can make for your business (we might be a tad bit biased 😜). But having someone who can help you with your business’s ups and downs is great for your sanity and for getting actionable advice to help you uplevel your business.
In this blog, we’re talking about three reasons why you need a business coach. And here’s the thing, we’re talking to all you established business owners out there because, from our experience, you could use someone in your corner.
3 Things You Can Do Before You Hire Your Next Freelancer or Employee
We know you can’t be an expert in every area of your business so there are some positions this tip doesn’t apply to. But let’s say you want to hire someone to be a salesperson to close client deals. The question you should be asking yourself is have you done those tasks in your business yet? Like do you have a process that you follow already for getting leads, sending out follow-up emails or DMs, what do you say, what has worked for you? This is important because knowing what that process looks like helps you decide who you need to hire and how to train them.
Or understanding this process gives you insight into what areas you can create systems and automate to free up more of your time. Cultivating sales is an important part of your business so if you can free up time in other areas then you can keep sales as a priority on your to-do list.
Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dubsado Proposals
Dubsado is an all-in-one CRM that allows you to do many many things right within the software. One of those things includes creating a variety of different forms, like proposals, contracts, questionnaires, and lead capture forms. Proposals are one of our favorite forms because when you send them, you have the option to make it an easy 3-step process for your clients where they can choose a package in your proposal, sign the contract, and pay the invoice all in three streamlined steps
Sending them is easy, and creating them can be even easier. Dubsado has a drag-and-drop form builder that makes building your proposal a breeze, which we’ll be diving into later. So, keep reading for our step-by-step guide to creating Dubsado proposals!
10 Tips for Networking When You Hate Networking
Networking is one of those words that can either make the social butterfly beam with excitement or the introverted feel more stressed and anxious. It’s not everyone’s favorite thing to do but if you’re a business owner it’s important to put yourself out there.
Making connections can help your business in so many ways. It enables you to meet influential people, gather info that may be beneficial to your business, and/or even just attain some biz support with like minded people.
Businesses are built around relationships. It’s truly who you know in many instances. So here are our 10 tips for networking when you hate networking.
The #1 Key to Reigniting Your Service-Based Business
Have you ever felt like this? It’s a weekday morning, you know you need to get out of bed and work on your business but you just do NOT have the energy or the brain power. You’ve lost the gumption you had when you first started your business and now you’re just feeling burnt out, and in a Cycle of Doom™.
Welcome to My Blog
Hey, I’m Abagail Pumphrey!
You know when you are so deeply passionate about something you can’t help but share it? That’s how this blog has felt for the last decade. I’ve written about my latest strategies, tech how-tos, experience with scaling and so much more. I hope you find just what you’re looking for. We’re here to help!
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