As a business owner, you inherently are a CEO, but it’s how you show up in that role that makes all the difference. CEOs play a super specific role in the company that evolves as the business grows. Right now, you may still be doing a lot of things related to your skill set and the results you bring to clients. After all, getting paid to do the things you love are part of the whole reason you started your business in the first place. But in order to run a successful and sustainable business, this involves doing things and having conversations that are otherwise out of your comfort zone.

Keep reading as we help you define what it means to step into your true CEO role and essential skills needed to run your business as the founder.

We know firsthand how challenging it can be to build and grow a business that can withstand the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. We’ve worked with service providers in all stages of business, and while they can all equally be difficult to navigate, they each come with their own unique struggles. For the service providers who are already hitting $20k months and beyond, there are essential skills needed in order to continue building a sustainable business and experience continued growth.

We recently wrote about whether or not service providers should pivot your offer or start over (you can read that post over here). We wouldn’t be Boss Project if we didn’t practice what we preached, so we’ve had a change in the works regarding our program, The Incubator. After 18+ months of data from clients going through our program, we saw a need for our own pivot. We’ve always prioritized not adding fluff and making sure that our offers aren’t overwhelming, so we analyzed our data and cut what wasn’t making a difference.

Being a lone service provider is fine in the beginning, but to really scale and grow your marketing business to the next level that will allow you to hit big financial goals and actually spend less time in the weeds, you have to scale to an agency. This means you outsource many of the services through your team that you were previously doing yourself. As you hire team members who specialize in certain services, you can even expand your business offering to market to a larger audience.

But first, there are critical action steps to take before growing to that next level. Keep reading as we dive into how to scale your marketing business to go from service provider to agency!

The thing about paid ads and social media is that no matter how excellent your strategy is, more often than not, you’re bombarded with leads that aren’t at the quality you need them to be. Heck, any kind of marketing can be confusing because of all of the new trends that come in hot and go just as quickly. We’ve said it a million times before, but relationship building and networking is where you’ll find your highest quality leads and potential clients. It’s even possible to do this and gain new clients in just one week.

In this post, we’ll be teaching you how to narrow down your offer, find your network, reach out to potential clients, and hold discovery calls and coffee dates all in the span of a week.

For the last seven years, we’ve worked with clients in a variety of capacities. When we first joined forces and started offering services, we were a local branding and marketing boutique. Then we flourished in the online course industry, but over the last year, we’ve been working with a handful of clients outside of our typical education products inside the Incubator. We loved getting back to the 1:1 experience, so we decided to open up a waitlist for our done-for-you services to a wider audience.

Lots of tweaking and repeating took place, but in 30 days we’d contracted $118k at a 60% close rate. Keep reading as we break down how we did it!

We can’t tell you how many times 6-figure service based business owners come to us stuck. Stuck in, what we call, the Cycle of Doom™. They come to us feeling super frustrated that, even though they’ve gotten their business to this amazing milestone, it all still feels so damn overwhelming. They know something needs to change, but what exactly is it? They’re faced with limited options - and maybe you are too. Today, we’re going to dive into the options that are available to you if you’re looking to scale past your first 6-figures and finally end the Cycle of Doom™ forever.

We bet you’re thinking that if you start using a certain software, tool, or marketing mechanism, that’s going to be the thing to soar you past 6 figures in your service-based business. (You can probably tell where we’re going with this, but…) In all actuality, it isn’t.

After working with 5-, 6-, even 7-figure clients who are charging anywhere from $750+ on retainer to $60k one-time projects, we know a thing or two about helping service providers scale past 6 figures without the stress, overwhelm, or taking up all of their precious time.

We know you’re so close to finally reaching that point in your business, too, but you just don’t think you have the time or capacity to make it happen. So, in our own experience working with these clients, here are the 3 things we’ve noticed are required for service-based business owners wanting to scale past 6 figures and beyond.

We were recently asked what was one of the biggest mistakes we had made in our business and one of our answers was how we structured our business. In the past our business was running on accomplishing task-based activities, rather than bringing in a team of permanent employees with outcome-based deliverables.

What do we mean by this? When Boss Project first started we had focused on hiring all contractors and less employees. The problem is that contractors are hired on to fulfill tasks. They do not hold the responsibility to fulfill actual outcomes in your business. For example, a social media contractor has the responsibility to create “x” amount of posts for you a month but at the end of the day you’re responsible for the follow-through and the outcomes. It’s still your job to convert social media leads into sales, make sure your sales page is up-to-date, have an opt-in, set up automations and systems etc.