April 2018 Monthly Review Session

Episode 216: Show Notes

Today on the show we are doing our monthly review for April 2018. Our monthly review is a popular episode that we do every month. In the past, we have gone into a lot of depth with all of our numbers and our tracking. However, we have decided to narrow it down a little bit to be a more of an overview. If you want all the nitty-gritty’s, you can find them inside The Goal Crusher Club. In the episode, we are a little goofy because well, April was crazy! We just got back from a week-long trip to Chicago for the She Did It Her Way Summit. We did some strategizing in our hotel room (which we covered in post-it notes and crazy-lady handwriting) and will be reporting back on our plans and goals for the future. We’ll also be discussing our experience switching email providers (again) from Infusionsoft to ActiveCampaign, as well as how we got 100 members into the Goal Crusher Club through some darn fine teamwork.

April 2018 Monthly Review Session
Abagail Pumphrey & Emylee Williams of The Strategy Hour

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In addition to that, we get into some deeper identity crises we’ve been experiencing in our business and the “Aha” moment in Chicago that reminded us that the destination is the journey. Our biggest glory moment this month has been the positive shifts we have seen in our team and how we have come to learn that teamwork takes, well, so much work. Work that is so worth it! We end off this episode with some good ol’ fashion funnel talk and our improvements to work toward for next month. We hope this episode will inspire you to keep going, even if you don’t have it all figured out yet. We sure don’t, but hey, we’re enjoying the ride. Bring it on May!

Our Switch From Infusionsoft To Sweet Angel Of Mercy, ActiveCampaign

This month we did some traveling and spent a week in Chicago for She Did It Her Way Summit, where Emylee had a cellphone crisis, we met tons of great people and hiked many stairs. Aside from that, our favorite thing we did this month in our business was transition our email service providers. We have already done this twice this year – we were on ConvertKit, are still on ConvertKit, still love and recommend ConvertKit but there were some analytics, some deeper integrations and automations that we wanted to add on. So we were told by a few people that Infusionsoft was the way to go. But girl, was it confusing and expensive! We did get a special deal on it, but if we were paying full price for it, we would have pulled the plug on it way sooner. The problem was that it didn’t do the things we were told it could do. Which is why we signed up... So we opted out.

What we were looking for specifically was an analytics driven dashboard with features to help us analyze what sales were coming from what funnels, etc. But they straight out lied, requesting that we move our entire e-commerce checkout platform over to them too. We’ve been down that road before and it was a big fat roadblock. With all of that being said, we switched to ActiveCampaign and we legit want to marry them! The support is incredible and get this, they even have a podcast. The host of the podcast is a heavenly angel of knowledge called Chris Davis. Our assistant today even called him Christ Davis. We could listen to him all day every day. Never seen him, never met him, but he is our new strategic internet boyfriend and we want his brain.

Getting 100 Members Into The GCC: That’s F*cking Teamwork!

Emylee’s focus over the past month has been on transition number one to Infusionsoft and on transition number two, to ActiveCampaign. We have been trying to automate our funnels to get The Strategy Academy on autopilot. But that has been on pause because we couldn’t send traffic to something that was in the process of being changed. Since this part of the biz was down, in the meantime, Abbie and the team focused on increasing the amount of members in The Goal Crusher Club (GCC). We said we wanted 100 members by the end of the month and in the last hour, we got it! We were so stoked for our team because it really was a group effort. The four core members of TCC each had a role in making that happen and that was really fun and collaborative.

Along that line, we’ve really improved the way that we communicate with our team. We added Andrea onto our weekly calls with Angela, so the four of us are meeting on a weekly basis and really focusing on income producing activities. Not only do we want our team to be focusing on their daily tasks, but we want them to be bringing money in for the company because our expenses have skyrocketed with all the things we have going on. Things had to change and they did! And we’re both super excited about where they are headed.

Markers and Post-its: What Went Down At The Chicago Strategy Session

Just so you know, we don’t always check off our boxes every month! There was one thing we did not accomplish. We intended to create a launch plan for SA later this summer. We wanted to do it in Chicago or after the Chicago trip. But we skipped that thing because we left Chicago feeling a little more airy than we anticipated. But it’s still on our calendar to do in the next couple of days and it’s going to get done.

But this leads us into the next thing from the Chicago strategy session. This looked like something we didn’t ever expect it to look like but we brought markers, post-it notes and giant wall sticky post-it notes and the idea was to stick those on the wall and map out ideas, quarters, years and everything we wanted to do. With the intention of walking away with so much clarity. But the truth is, we kept getting stuck. But the “Aha” moment did not come until the morning when we were checking out. After being in Chicago for five days our 2019, 2020 and 2021 post-it notes were blank. But on that day something just clicked.

Dealing With Identity Crises And The “Aha” Moment

So Emylee went and crossed out all the years and made a timeline across all of the post-its and said “Let’s just look at our business bucket list.” We spread these goals out over our timeline and the time it will take to complete all of them is still completely up in the air! However it still feels a lot more reassuring going into that meeting, knowing that our goals have been heard and articulated and they have been put out onto some scope in time. These bigger, legacy-level decisions will happen when the opportunity shifts for them to happen and we don’t want to confine our business into a box and say, “This better happen by exactly such and such a time, or else!”

Coming away from Chicago, Abbie had a clear vision of “I am who I am in the moment. I have the power to change that at any time.” Abbie wrote down some of the things that she wanted to be, like a coach who helps people in their lives and businesses. What she realized is that she is all of those things already and she was just failing to recognize them as part of her identity. As our business has ticked things off the checklist, Abbie has realized for herself that the journey is the destination. And we are in the same space. What a feeling.

Building Relationships At Events and The Shifts In Our Team

The last goal that had to check was to build relationships at the events we went to in Chicago, and girl did we! We met so many new people, got out of our bubble, and as a result,you guys are going to get a bunch of amazing podcast guests who you’ve never heard of! Our accomplishments this month, although were a lot of nitty-gritty detail work and then a whole lot of travel fun at the end of the month; the biggest shift this month really happened in our team. Our team came together and felt way more unified. This month it really felt like we were working toward the same game and the same goals. We were just more in tune with what was going on in each other’s lives and it just felt really good. There has always kind of been something that isn’t clicking with our team and after getting a lot of helpful nuggets from colleagues, we started implementing very small changes and the minute we started doing that, we felt the tone shifting and we’ve only seen great results from that moving forward.

We want to dedicate a whole podcast on team communication and identifying roles, because it has been so big for us. The biggest issue that kept arising is that we loved our team members and they were helping to keep the business going but they were not adding monetarily to it. It was more people doing more things but we weren’t really growing. So we wanted to empower our team to feel like they could bring something to the table that actually shifted our business and brought in revenue. We really honed in on income producing activities, walking them through as a team and ensuring that everyone felt empowered to run with it. It’s a learning curve, so hopefully some lessons from that will help you guys.

Improvements: Weekly Funnel Check-in’s and Dividing Tasks

We have a couple of funnels and automations going on right now and on the 1st Emylee did an enormous data collection and she will be assessing those later in the month, make very small changes to each of those funnels, measure the results next month and note the improvements. With that we are going to have a weekly check-in with our funnels. We also found ourselves getting distracted and checking stats throughout the day. So we decided to set up a time to do a weekly stat check-in instead, rather than getting sucked into the stat rabbit hole when we shouldn’t be. Babysitting it isn’t going to do you any good, so being more intentional about when you check your stats can save you a lot of time and distraction. Another improvement we are working on is, we have been doing everything for a long time, together. As our business has grown we have realized that we’re two human beings who are capable of things and we have the ability to be in charge of our own departments. We have decided to be more divisive with our tasks. Emylee is going to be responsible for the bottom of the funnel, everything that happens after pitch. Abbie is going to be focusing on the top of the funnel. What is happening with social and ads etc. Obviously we are going to need each other’s help with these things but we think that this model will help us grow faster. And we’re so excited about it!

 

Quote This

I am who I am in the moment and I have the power to change that at any time.

 

Highlights

  • Our Switch From Infusionsoft To Sweet Angel Of Mercy, ActiveCampaign. [0:10:22.1]

  • Getting 100 Members Into The GCC: That’s F*cking Teamwork! [0:16:30.1]

  • Markers and Post-its: What Went Down At The Chicago Strategy Session. [0:21:00.1]

  • Dealing With Identity Crises and The “Aha” Moment. [0:23:07.1]

  • Building Relationships At Events and The Shifts In Our Team. [0:28:45.1]

  • Improvements: Weekly Funnel Check-in’s and Dividing Tasks. [0:33:12.1]


ON TODAY’S SHOW

Abagail & Emylee

The Strategy Hour Podcast

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We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.

KEY TOPICS

April review, Funnels, Goal Crusher Club, Data analytics, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, Networking


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