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Grow, Leadership Guest User Grow, Leadership Guest User

24 Ridiculously Useful Tips Every Small Business Needs to Generate Buzz and Plan Your Next Launch

Whether your new website is about to be revealed, you’re about to open up 1:1 coaching slots or a brand new product is about to hit your (digital) shelves it’s important to generate a buzz around it and create a launch plan. We know it’s hard to know where to begin. So we have come up with 15 organic ways to generate buzz and 9 steps to build your launch plan. Take it one step at a time and you are bound to see results. It's just that easy.  |  Think Creative Collective

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Guest User Grow, Leadership Guest User

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.

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership, Systems & Automation Guest User Grow, Leadership, Systems & Automation Guest User

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!

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Grow, Leadership Guest User Grow, Leadership Guest User

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!

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Grow, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

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.

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Grow, Leadership Guest User Grow, Leadership Guest User

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.

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Learn, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Learn, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

What Subject Matter Experts Need to Know About Running a Profitable Business

By definition, a Subject Matter Expert (SME) is a person who is an authority in a particular area or topic. They’re knowledgeable about their topic, they focus on a very specific field, and they’re extremely sought after. If you’re a 1:1 service provider whose expertise lies in a specific niche, then you, our friend, are a Subject Matter Expert!

For example, a general Social Media Manager wouldn’t usually be classified as a SME, but an Instagram Strategy Consultant for veterinarians could be. You can fill in the blanks with your specific niche and ideal client. This isn’t to say one is better than the other, but we do want you to understand the difference between a generalist title versus a SME.

In this post, we’ll be covering 4 things that we think SMEs really need to be aware of about running a profitable business!

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Optimize, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Optimize, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

Which is Best for Your Business? Group Coaching or 1 on 1

We’ve heard it many times before and we’re sure it won’t be the last time. You want to burn your business to the ground and rebuild it into something new? We get it, building a business is not easy and sometimes plateaus are hit and building something new feels like the best answer.

We know there’s a ceiling that gets hit over and over again with 1:1 service providers.You’re cruising along and then one day you’ve hit an income ceiling and time ceiling and it seems like the only way out is to pivot. You’re convinced that your done-for-you service is the timesuck (and it is), but your solution is to pivot to serve more people, but less hands on. And it seems sexy at first, we get it! But we’re here to do what we do best and poke holes in your seemingly seamless shift so you can truly find the best solution for you.

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