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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
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Work Less, Make More: How to Streamline Your Work Week & Increase Your Client Capacity
It probably wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that a common dream amongst business owners is to be able to work less but make more money. It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s actually entirely possible to achieve. By streamlining your work week and increasing your client capacity, you’re able to get back more time in your business and make more money.
There are really only two levers to pull in order to do this: 1. Increase the price of your package, and 2. Decrease the amount of time it takes to complete a client project. In this blog post, we’ll break down what it means to accomplish each of these, so you can finally reach your “work less, make more” goal.
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!
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.
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!
How to Set Goals and Achieve Them in 2022
One of our favorite activities to do in our business is goal setting. We love planning where we want our business to be in the coming months, quarters, or years. There’s just something so refreshing and exciting about envisioning hitting those milestones!
However, we don’t set goals by just making up a financial number that we’d like to see our business hit. We really dig into our numbers and use our lifestyle/business wants and needs in tandem with evaluating our current offerings to give us a number that’s realistically reachable.
Keep reading if you want to learn our process of goal setting, so you can actually achieve them in 2022!
Our Top 10 Favorite Productivity Tools for 2021
Owning and operating your own business generally means that you end up wearing lots of hats, especially when you haven’t yet formed a team. You’re not only the director of pushing out and creating all the content, but the one who markets it, organizes getting paid, communicates with clients, and so much more.
Needless to say, all of this can be beyond overwhelming, unless you have the tools and systems in place to help you save energy, time, and money. If you know anything about us at all, it’s probably that we’re all about tools and systems. It’s like therapy for us knowing that we have a system for every part of our business.
Today, we want to share our top 10 favorite productivity tools for 2021 and how they impact our business, in hopes that they can help you in your business, too! And, yes, we actually use and love the tools on this list!
Lessons from 2020: Sales, Setbacks, and Surprises
We’ll gladly join the masses of people saying that they’re so glad that 2020 is over! And it isn’t so much that we expect the pandemic and all of the issues that come with it to just disappear with a new year, but more so that we’re now able to reflect on the year and kick everything in gear for 2021.
For us, 2020 was a whirlwind, but it was actually our best years ever. Of course we still dealt with setbacks just like everyone else, but we changed up the way we did things at the beginning of 2020, and it had a profound impact on how the year played out.
So what did we change? What actually happened for us in 2020? And what lessons did we learn that we’re carrying into 2021?
Launch Simply in 2021
If there’s anyone that knows a thing or two about launching, it’s us. In the past 5 years we’ve been in business, we’ve launched more times than we can count with a multitude of different products and services as our business transitioned and grew.
During the different seasons of our business, we’ve had big launches, small launches, and everything in between, so we’ve also picked up on how to do it without being so stressed. We think the number one important thing about launching is that it’s fun and simple. Otherwise, who the heck would ever want to launch anything?
So, today, we’re going to share with you a little about our plan for launching simply, and show you our little secret for making launching even easier.
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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