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.

You started your service-based business because you had dreams you wanted to achieve and goals to accomplish. Unfortunately, you just haven’t quite been able to get there yet.

It seems like you keep signing low-ticket clients and doing triple the work than you actually have time for. Your personal life? Virtually non-existent at this point because of how deep you’re buried in client work, yet you have little to no income or growth to show for it.

There’s no secret to making all the problems in your business disappear, and that’s because we don’t want to keep signature services a secret! Creating a signature service is what will enable you to open so many doors in your business that you’ve barely been able to crack thus far.

In this blog post, we’ll be covering how to create a signature service in 30 days or less, so keep reading as we break it down by four tangible weeks!

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™.

As a Virtual Assistant, likely one of the best ways to describe your services is “flexible.” Especially as a General VA, flexibility is one thing that seemingly allows you to keep growing your business. Because you probably don’t specialize in one specific area, you’re able to keep adjusting and bending to your clients’ needs and adding more skills to your bucket.

However, another common theme within the VA world is one that we believe can become detrimental: hourly pricing. As you become more efficient in your work and take less time to complete things, this comes back to bite you in the rear.

The solution? Honing into a signature service that you can offer at a package rate. In this blog post, we’ll be diving into what a signature service is and how you can create one for your Virtual Assistant business!

We’ve talked a lot about how to create a signature service here on the blog (like here, here, and also here). Creating a signature service is the best way to eliminate competition, stand out in your niche, and do exactly what you love for exactly who you love to work for. In fact, we help our clients refine their offer into a High-Touch Signature Service™ inside The Incubator. (Psst.. you can learn more and apply here.)

Before we dive into what this could look like for you, let’s get clear on what a signature service actually is!

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.

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.

As Business Service Providers it’s important to get clear on the education you want for yourself as a business leader. How are you adding value to your business and to your team? There are a lot of options out there so we wanted to give our perspective on group coaching services vs 1:1 coaching services and which is better for your business's growth.

We have heard all the apprehensions when it comes to group coaching programs. Anything from, people are afraid of not getting enough individual attention, or they won’t get their questions answered or they’re afraid they’ll get lost in the noise. If you’ve ever been avoidant of group coaching sessions for those reasons, we’re here to give you a different perspective.

Not only that, but from teaching our own group coaching program (The Incubator) AND investing in other people’s programs, we’ve learned the best ways you can stand out and get the most out of your group coaching experience.

You’re technically working “on your business” all the time, but what about the time you take out to learn from someone else? To get new insights and ideas, what to do differently, growth strategies and guidance? Your schedule is so full that you hardly even have time to do the things outside of work that you enjoy, much less focus on business education.

You know that you need outside help, but you continue to push it back because you’re waiting for the “right” time, for a moment where you feel like you have more time on your calendar to dedicate to it. The thing is, how many other things are you waiting until that calendar space opens up for you to get to it?

Keep reading to find out when is actually the right time to work on your business and the importance of actively prioritizing education, so you can start seeing drastic changes quickly.