Top Business Podcast • over 4 million downloads • 900+ episodes

The Strategy Hour Podcast

with abagail pumphrey

Recognized by INC and Forbes as one of the best podcasts for entrepreneurs, join our twice-weekly show as we share business strategies, interviews, and actionable advice for building an online business your way.

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Our Episodes

Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

November 2021 Profit Report: Creating Real Sustainable Income and Dissecting Our New Growth Trajectory

Welcome back to another profit report! We’re going back in time to talk about November 2021. We’ve been doing these profit reports for over two years, and we can’t believe how time has flown by! For those who are new to the profit report, in these episodes, we offer a breakdown of our strategies and decisions, as well as insights into how money moves around within a company like ours. It allows you to gain an informed perspective on what it looks like to grow a company of our size, and hear insider conversations about things like healthy profit margins and expenses.

Today, we talk about our launch in October and how it has affected our November profits, including recurring revenue from people who made purchases in October. We unpack some of the exciting changes we’ve made, particularly when it comes to budgeting and reimagining how we’re going to continue to grow and scale. You’ll also hear about why a lot of this comes down to hiring and how we make decisions around that based on projections of client needs and outcomes. Tune in for a detailed breakdown of our profit report, insights into our goals for next year, and why we are so excited to grow!

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

Creating Benefits to Attract Top Talent

This week on the Strategy Hour podcast, we discuss how to create benefits that will attract top talent while also allowing your company to thrive. Running your business can often put you in situations where you have to compromise, but that doesn’t mean those compromises have to be permanent. Once you reach the point where you can take on new staff, you can begin to ask yourself what benefits you can offer versus what you want to offer. It won’t happen overnight, but setting out goals that build towards your vision for your company can be incredibly motivating!

Hiring new staff can come with a series of unanticipated costs outside of their salaries, like taxes and opening new 401K plans. While it may seem overwhelming at first, a little planning goes a long way. We’ve benefited greatly from having expert consultants advise us on how to take on new hires, from accountants to help us with cash flow, to HR’s advice on how to structure maternity leave and healthcare benefits. It’s been incredibly exciting entering this stage of our business, where we can grow our work community and set goals for how we can support our employees in every aspect of their lives! We fully believe that you are so much more than your job and your career, and we want to support all those elements from family, to friends, to health and alternative medicine.

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

October 2021 Profit Report: Increasing our MRR by 77% in Less than 7 Days

We’ve been working on something exciting for a really long time and today’s episode exists to introduce you to our newest offering, which includes taking on clients for our business incubator! Our business was working. We could have successfully continued with our existing plan. Instead, we made an intentional move, looked at what we wanted to do, saw that the mission was the same as when we started, and then asked ourselves how we could achieve even more of that!

If you can focus less on what you want and more on the problem you are actively solving for your audience, the doors will open. Your business should take care of you, NOT drain you! We want you to know that where we are today is the result of having a full staff of people, an audience in the millions, and six whole years of hard work, which is why we are sharing some insight into our hiring process, the art of simmering, our desire to take on clients again, and so much more in our October profit report for 2021! Join us today!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Exiting Corporate and Stepping Into Building YOUR Brand and Business with Shaunda Head of SHH Creative

In today’s episode, we gain a really interesting perspective on the topic of branding from Shaunda Head, an Atlanta-based brand strategist and digital marketer who helps women align ALL THE THINGS in their brand so that their brand message can impact more powerfully! We chat about Shaunda’s experience of building her expertise in corporate institutions and the challenges of the transition between that world and going out on her own. Shaunda also shares the process she went through to uncover who she really is, rather than who she was when she was working for someone else.

A lot of our clients are in the same position; you guys are highly skilled, you know your shit, and you can serve people in incredible ways, but figuring out how to do that outside of someone else’s umbrella can be what is holding you back. This episode will give you some amazing ideas on how to rebrand yourself so you can step into who you truly are, so make sure to join us today to learn more from the amazing Shaunda Head!

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

Passive Income Doesn't Exist (Here's What to Do Instead)

We recently brought in an amazing cohort of clients inside of the incubator. Throughout that process we’ve read hundreds of applications, and there are two sentences that we found as a recurring theme and desire within these applications which we really want to respond to. We’ve got a lot to say on this topic, and we feel very passionately about it, so get ready for the rant! People have this elusive idea that they want to earn a passive income. In other words, they want to earn money in their sleep.

There is a version of this that does exist, and we’ll happily share that with you, but passive income isn’t what you think it is. If you believe that if you’re not chasing passive income then you’re doing business wrong, you need to listen to this. The way passive income is framed in the online industry is toxic, and can cause you to miss out on so many great opportunities. We know that passive income sounds like a perfect scenario, but today you’ll hear why it’s really not all that cracked up to be!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Unpopular Opinion: The Toxic Behavior That is Rampant Inside the Business "Education" Industry

There’s a massive problem that’s affecting our entire audience right now, and we have some seriously strong feelings about it, which you’re going to hear all about in today’s episode. Do you guys remember that show called Celebrity Deathmatch? That’s what we’re doing today, but we’ve got “serving” and “marketing” in the ring. We are furious on behalf of our clients because of how they have been manipulated into wasting so much of their time and money.

Today, we’re going on record to say that the business education industry is rampant with marketing pros trying to teach other people to be marketing minions instead of actually teaching foundational business concepts that don’t change. Marketing is in our blood, so we get the desire to do this, but marketing is not the key to success. Hear us out.

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

A Bookkeeper's Perspective on the 1:1 vs. 1:Many Business Model with Parker Stevenson

Put your socks on, pour a fresh cup of coffee and tune into this conversation with Parker Stevenson. If you’re a service provider who wants to make more and work less, today’s episode is for you! It’s not that we’re comparing one business model against the other, but rather, we’re considering an informed perspective on the 1:1 and 1:many approaches to business.

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

September 2021 Profit Report: Growing Our Membership 26% in Revenue in 30 Days

We’re taking it back to September! It feels weird, but we’re going to recap all of the amazing, incredible things that we did in the month of September so that you guys can get a little peek behind the curtains and get to understand what goes on in our brains and why we do the things we do. September was only last month, but it feels like a lifetime ago because we have been moving fast and furiously at team Boss Project.

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Unpopular Opinion: Courses & Digital Products are NOT the Fastest Way to Double Your Income

This episode comes with a bit of a trigger warning. We're both feeling a bit nervous about this one, which has never happened before. It's based on the conversations that we have privately with each other when we see peers, clients, and students making the wrong assumptions about the topic that we're going to talk about today. We decided that we're doing a disservice by only having those conversations privately. What lights us up is to impact others and to change their lives and to have small business owners be financially and soulfully fulfilled, and to do that we feel that we have to share our take on this.

If this conversation doesn't apply to you, you can skip it. If you are already crushing it and your business is made up primarily of courses and digital products and you're thriving and meeting your financial goals, then this conversation isn't for you. However, if you started as a service-based business owner and have added on courses and digital products and you have struggled financially and stressed yourself out because of it, then this episode is most definitely for you!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

August 2021 Profit Report: Here's How We Increased Our LTV by 33%

Are you ready to join us on a journey back in time? We’re taking you back about 40 days to talk about our August numbers. We did so many things in August. It was a whirlwind of a summer! In today’s episode, we’re going to give you the scoop of what’s happening in our business in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you get “comparisonitis,” because there’s nothing worse than that. We approach these profit reports from a strategy perspective and what works for us, and we share achievable percentages which will allow you to look at your own business and decide what does and doesn’t make sense for you.

We started doing profit reports almost two years ago, and these involve us talking about profits and percentages and our goal of achieving a certain profit for our business. If you go do a binge listen of all of the profit reports we’ve done so far, you’ll get some great insights into our business and our brains.

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

How to Prepare Your Business to Sell (Even If You Don't Want to Sell It) with Gwen Lane

Today on the podcast, we have Gwen Lane, who has been through quite the evolution. She was a digital marketer turned lifestyle blogger and is now the founder of a Seven-Figure Influencer Program. She helps content creators and influences monetize through premium partnerships and digital offers. She has worked with crazy brands over the years, and she's also sold her business. Gwen breaks down two strategies: one where she sold her business that she started as a side hustle blog and what it means to be an influencer, what it requires to be in that space, and more. You're going to learn so much from Gwen.

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Building a Hybrid Modeled Business

Today, we’re talking about what it is like to start to view your business through a new lens, specifically the new lens that we’ve been looking at our business through; the hybrid. What is a hybrid business model and how does it infiltrate into all the areas of our business that we’re running? Our hybrid thought process is something that has shifted how we view our business, from looking at each piece separately to understanding it as a coherent whole. A lot of this new thinking centers around our approach to hiring people and managing their roles, as well as our own roles, in our business.

As you guys know, when we learn or uncover something we like to immediately turn around and workshop it here on the podcast because it helps us wrap our brains around it. We are by no means at the point where we have a complete understanding of what our hybrid business model means, we’re still at the early stages of discovery. It’s important for you to have context so you need to hear a bit of the background and how a late-night moment allowed us to open our eyes to the value of a hybrid model. So, join us on the journey!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Death to The Integrator: The Role that could Kill Your Business

In this week’s episode, we take a look at the role of the integrator in online businesses. We discuss how the role has come about, what exactly it entails, and how hiring the wrong integrator places your business in jeopardy. While the role has gained significant traction in the last few years as a necessary step for any expanding online business, there are also some serious pitfalls that need to be considered!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

We Have a New Podcast: Here's How to Listen

Are you tired of hearing our voices yet? We hope not because guess what just launched? Another freaking podcast! More words for your ear boxes in our voices. It's been so exciting to watch people’s reactions when they hear this is a thing. They'll say that they’ve been listening to the show for years, but then the questions start rolling in about the new show, “Where is it?” or, “I can’t find it,” or “How do I get access?” So, we are here, on our current podcast, to tell you about our new podcast that’s just launched, and we want to talk to you about how you can get access and what’s all involved because this is big news folks. We will talk about some high-level deets and what you can do to get inside.

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Hiring Tips for Growing Small Businesses with Kira La Forgia

Today’s guest is Kira La Forgia, someone who actually enjoys 1099s, W2s, FMLA, and FLSA; you know, all the human resources stuff that usually goes right over your head! Her operations consulting company, Paradigm Consulting, provides resources to online-based business owners that put people's operations at the center of the organizational structure. Kira knows how to project, streamline, and scale businesses, working with leaders in their fields to blend their strengths, passions, and experiences into their unique company culture and develop a robust hiring and growth strategy, as well as providing you with the people you need to move your business forward!

In this episode, we talk about what that looks like at different stages and Kira shares her top hiring tips for growing small businesses. Abagail and Emylee actually hired Kira as a consultant for their own company as they were phasing into growth and hiring employees, which is why we invited her on the show to share her take on small businesses, or businesses who are hiring contractors or virtual assistants, even for the first time. Kira shares some of the things you can set up to better your experience with contractors, the do’s and don’ts when it comes to contractors versus employees, and everything you need to know about your employee handbook, as well as how you can make the onboarding process, associated learning curves, and mindset shifts around hiring a whole lot easier!

We also touch on HR basics for small teams looking to hire contractors and employees, some of the mindset shifts you need to make when it comes to your team members, plus a new way of looking at org charts and what you need to do differently. We all want a scalable business model with no limit on revenue, which is why Kira’s insights are so valuable. Make sure not to miss this incredible and informative conversation, packed full of practical advice that you can implement today!

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meet your host

I don’t believe there’s one right way to build a business.

I’m your host, Abagail Pumphrey. And I’m dedicated to supporting online businesses.

I’m here to help you build business your way: one that supports not only the life you have but the life you want. I’m on a personal mission to help you become financially free.

I’m talking about all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a 7-figure online business. I’m here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way, whether you’re creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business.

I want to hear your hot takes, your biggest takeaways, or the genius ideas that pop in your head as you’re listening to the show.

My DMs are always open on Instagram, so head over and introduce yourself so I can get to know you!

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Meet Our Partners

The links below are affiliate links. We receive a commission (at no additional cost to you) when you purchase through these links.

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