business insights
I’m officially building my first Al app. No code. No hoodie-wearing co-founder. Just me, my idea, a no-code tool called Lovable.dev, and two years of quietly training an Al on everything I know about marketing, messaging, and digital products.
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100 Profitable Digital Product Ideas
Plus, a totally free challenge to kick you into action and get this baby launched.
How to Become the Creative Director of Your Small Business
So often when starting a creative service-based business, you start to feel disconnected with the reason you even started your business in the first place. Even when you’re absolutely crushing it in your business, landing clients left and right, and are super busy, that often comes with more things outside of client deliverables.
Taking on the CEO role means you have to deal with more things that may feel out of alignment with the thing you really love doing. What we’ve learned from being in that position is that feeling that connection to what you’re creating is the most important thing for a service provider to protect.
In this blog post, we’ll be sharing how to become the creative director of your small business, so you can still deliver on your services while building a high caliber business!
23 Ideas for Better Client Communication, Client Experience & Client Testimonials
When you think about it, client communication, the experience, and testimonials are the holy trifecta of an amazing service-based business. They also work as a kind of cycle– great client communication leads to a great experience, which leads to even greater testimonials when it’s all said and done!
We’ve had our fair share of not only working with clients but also helping other service providers work with their clients. In doing so, we’ve learned a myriad of ways to improve that client cycle. So today, we’ll be sharing our 23 ideas for better client communication, client experience, and client testimonials!
7 Tips to Streamline Your Services so You Can Boost Your Team’s Productivity
We see you, frazzled service provider. We see you bustling and overwhelmed, reinventing the wheel every time you perform any admin task in your business. You’re building your proposals and forms from scratch, manually emailing clients repetitive emails in your process, chasing down payments, etc.
The overwhelming majority of service providers are, well, overwhelmed (and quite frankly, underpaid). We understand because we originated as a service-based business. There are 7 tips that massively helped us streamline our services and made a huge difference in our overall productivity, which is what we’ll be sharing in this blog post!
If you want to take this a step further with us to help you create a High-Touch Signature Service on Autopilot™ so you can work less and make more, we invite you to apply for The Incubator.
Best Passive Income Ideas for Your Small Business in 2022
In this day and age of online business, it’s extremely easy to give into the elusive passive income trend. We talk about it with our family and friends, and we learn from marketing gurus on the internet that the end goal is to “make money while you sleep.”
Sure, it does sound great. Being able to give little to no effort yet still have money rolling in sounds like a dream. Spoiler alert: What they’re teaching you isn’t really passive income.
Keep reading to find out the true definition of passive income, our honest thoughts around it, and what you should do instead.
Roundup -The Best Business Resources for Creatives in 2021
This year has been a wild year of content for us! We’ve cranked out almost 200 total blog posts and podcast episodes, dropped almost 50 new collections of templates, updated some of our programs and added a new one, and overall have really been dedicated to helping creative business owners.
We thought the perfect post for the end of 2021 would be to gather all of the best resources for creatives and wrap them all up with a pretty bow. (Late Christmas gift, maybe?) We have a lot to dive into, so let’s get started!
How to Host Co-working Sessions to Boost Productivity in Your Business
When you have a team that works from home or any sort of virtual community space, it can be a little more difficult to make sure everyone is being productive. One way we’ve been able to set accountability and give that much needed support to each other is by holding co-working sessions.
Co-working sessions are when you, a team member, or even your whole team hop on a group video chat (we prefer Zoom) to literally work together. Back when Boss Project was just Abagail and Emylee, we’d often hop on Zoom or Google Hangouts to complete tasks together. We’d hang out for hours on end, sometimes a whole working day just to hold each other accountable.
Now, we want to share how we host efficient co-working sessions to boost productivity in our business!
How to Host a Virtual Team Mixer or Holiday Party
Not being in the physical presence of team members means that there’s a bit more extra work involved to make sure everyone feels connected. You can absolutely still have a closely knit virtual team, and we absolutely love the workspace tone we’ve set with our team!
One of the ways we get in some much-needed face time is by hosting virtual team mixers. Since the holidays are coming up hot, hosting a virtual holiday party is the perfect way to get your team members chatting and connecting with each other outside of the usual workplace communication!
Keep reading to find out exactly how we host our virtual team mixers, plus some team building questions to ask to keep everyone engaged!
The BEST Tool to Help Land High-Paying Clients Consistently
The biggest struggles we’ve seen service providers face includes difficulty landing high-paying clients consistently. They may land just one or two clients per month at their highest package, but the rest always fall on the smaller scale. This can lead to just breaking even each month, which leads to feelings of discouragement, worry, and self doubt.
But before we say “Just raise your prices!”, we understand that there are other steps that go into that as well. Part of being able to offer a premium package is providing more value through your client experience. That may sound to you like you need to start holding your clients’ hands more or putting more of your time into how you take care of them, but that simply isn’t the case.
You can completely transform your business with one single tool that we’re going to share with you in this blog post!
Dubsado vs. HoneyBook Feature and Interface Comparison
There are two top dogs in the CRM game right and now, and they’re crushing it: Dubsado and HoneyBook. About half of the service providers you talk to will be Team Dubsado, while the other half are Team HoneyBook.
No matter which team you choose, though, having a CRM is a massively important piece of running a service-based business. You need some type of system to help you streamline your processes, leads, client communication, and more, and either of these platforms will help you do so.
So, which team are we? Today we’re going to dive into comparing Dubsado vs. HoneyBook’s features and interface. For us and many others we know, these are the two main deal breakers when it comes to choosing any sort of software, not just CRMs. Keep reading if you want to find out who comes out on top!
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!
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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