This week, we have a very exciting episode with Emylee, Abagail, and Abagail’s partner, Jared Pumphrey, who joined the team earlier this year as Boss Project’s Marketing Manager! Join us as we dive into what Jared’s role entails, how it has impacted our business, and how he has no idea how we managed before we had someone dedicated to running the day-to-day operations. Tuning in, you’ll also find out how to set boundaries for a healthy marriage when going into business with your spouse, as well as what Jared and Abagail love about working together.

Jared unpacks the importance of having an internal system for quality control and why, if you're the last person who did something to a document, you can't verify that it's perfect. Later, we reflect on how a team can thrive when they are allowed to play to their strengths, what that entails, and how you can go about helping them operate in their zone of genius.

In this episode we’re talking all things holiday and work and productivity and delegation and organizing and all of that good stuff! If you haven’t listened to any of our previous episodes about taking the full month of December off, we highly recommend that you go do that. But today’s episode is going to be a little bit different, because our business looks a little bit different now. We’re going through a different season in our business, so we aren’t taking the full month off like we have done in the past, we’re still going to make sure that we enjoy our holiday season!

When we first began to consider that we may need personal assistants, we discovered that we had some unexpected, and somewhat complicated, reservations. While the extra help would certainly have been welcome, we had a tough time justifying the hire in our minds. Hiring an assistant brought up an unexpected amount of mind junk, from outdated notions around a woman’s role in the house to Emylee’s very personal experience of her mom and nana owning a cleaning business, and it just seemed impossible to align the hire with our values. Add to that the terrible depictions of personal assistants that you saw in movies like The Devil Wears Prada, where PAs were always repeatedly degraded by their bosses, and the idea of hiring a personal assistant could easily make you feel like a monster.

It took us months and years to finally process and overcome these limiting beliefs and ultimately make one of the best decisions of our careers! Not only was hiring a personal assistant much more affordable and manageable than we expected, but we hadn’t anticipated the amount of freedom, peace of mind, and brain space it would give us! No matter where you are in your career, hiring a personal assistant is likely a much more achievable goal than you realize. In this episode, we break down how we chose to get a personal assistant, the process we used to prioritize our needs and reflect on how our personal assistants impacted our lives. So let’s dive in!

Today on the podcast, we are joined by our good friends from Dubsado, co-founder and CEO, Becca Berg and Sam Gioia from their product department. Most of our listeners are well aware that we are big fans of Dubsado and how they help businesses thrive by taking away the busywork. Dubsado is a fantastic platform, especially for small businesses! They have created an all-in-one system that helps you stay in motion, build relationships, schedule appointments, and create workflows to streamline your projects from start to finish.

In this episode, we chat with Becca and Sam about the many new features Dubsado has in store for its users. We hear about how they’re finding innovative ways to interrogate and test the usability of their platform, and the pressure and sense of overwhelm that comes with a desire to make your software, service, and product perfect before releasing it to the public. As a response to this challenge, we examine how you can break that intimidating perfection down into tangible goals and steps, allowing you to accurately view the progress you’re making on the elements you want to improve for your clients, students, or anyone else you may be working with.

We cover a host of concepts in this episode that are relevant to anyone, not just software companies, making this an excellent listen for anyone interested in improving products and services for their clients! Dubsado has an ethos of service, which resonates strongly with Abagail and Emylee as ex-service-based owners. At our core, we are both driven by how to best serve our clients and customers, but this episode offers some excellent ideas that can be implemented in any business and is also an exciting behind-the-scenes look at Dubsado’s new features that they’ll be rolling out soon. Be sure to tune in to this information-packed episode on all things development, customer service, and so much more!

It is officially Christmas in July here at Boss Project! In case you haven’t heard, we are in the midst of our wildly popular 5 Days to Launch Challenge, which has helped over 10,000 business owners get their products, offers, and big dream ideas out into the world. If you are listening to this and you haven’t signed up yet, head on over to 5daystolaunchchallenge.com to sign up for this completely free program RIGHT NOW! Diving into today’s episode, we share the seven things you need to know and think about in order to take full advantage of this challenge. We know that any time and energy you give us this week is precious, which is why we want to help you make the most of it.

This program is specifically designed to move you and your business forward by identifying your most viable offer, packaging and selling it, and creating a WOW! experience for your customers, as well as walking you through your marketing game plan and, of course, the launch itself. In this episode, we cover how selfishness is the thing that will keep you motivated, why you need a Tinder-level offer right now, and the best way to use people in order to land more dreamy clients, plus a whole lot more! Tune in to find out everything you need to know to fully benefit from this powerful opportunity to get yourself out there and get started today!

Parker Stevenson is a great friend of ours and someone we love and respect a lot! He has done so much for us and our business in the years that we have been working together with Parker handling all of our bookkeeping. He has already been on the podcast a bunch of times and today he is back to talk about the all-important topic of launching! We get into cash-flowing a launch, how to know when you are ready or not ready, questions and preparation and how to pay yourself when it's all done. So basically we cover all the things you might be thinking about and what better person to ask than a bookkeeper.

Parker is all about helping his clients remain profitable and this conversation will get you into a great headspace for possible launches in the future. We offer tons of free resources in the second half of the show so be sure to stick around for those and Parker gives the inside scoop on many businesses and how he has seen launches evolve. In his work, he has helped countless small businesses that apply to so much of our audience. So for all that and a whole lot more on getting your next launch off the ground and into the air, join us as we talk strategy!

Today on the show we welcome Shunta Grant, an incredible soul who helps women live lives with intention. Through her company, Best Today, Shunta equips women with resources to be both proactive and intentional with their time. Shunta begins with time because it is the container that holds our days in our lives. She also offers a Best Today Guide, which is a 14-week undated guide that helps women plan their days with intention through her signature process, The Right Now Routine, which is what we are talking about today — how to create realistic routines that last.

We are super excited to break down this conversation for you today, while Abagail shares her journey of going through the program and how it deeply impacted her life, and the examples of how she has used it. Then Emylee shares about the program and why she has avoided going through it because of her misconceptions about routine and what it might mean for her in her day. Shunta does a really amazing job breaking down those hesitations and how routines can still work for creatives, for neurodivergents, and for people who don’t want a lot of structure in their day. We know you will get a lot of great ideas from this episode, so stick to the very end to find out more about all of Shunta’s amazing resources that you can dive into today to learn how to create a routine that’s perfect for you!

So, we just wrapped up the recording for our most popular webinar ever, Day Job to Dream Job. The discussion sparked some further conversations between us and some of our students about the whole ‘you can earn a full-time income without putting in full-time hours.’ We have the belief that you can do this from day one, and that it doesn't have to just be a financial milestone you reward yourself with. But the time and space freedom you get when you work for yourself looks different when you're just getting started versus when you are two years in, six years in, and even further in than that. So, today, we want to break down what we mean by that and dive into what we truly think is needed for the brain to rewire that thought process. We also give a sneak peek of what it looks like when you chase after free time, and how you choose to fill that free time. Because there are some of us who simply fill the free time we work so hard for with just more work!

Today on the show we have Dr. Lindsay Padilla, Founder of Hello Audio, a SaaS product that lets users easily create private audio feeds their customers can listen to anywhere, anytime! She has been building this SaaS product from the ground up. It has been fascinating to watch from the sidelines and we are excited for you guys to dive in. For the first half of this episode, Lindsay gives us a true, honest, behind-the-scenes look at everything it takes both mentally and logistically to build a software. Everything that she wanted to create from the hole she saw in the market of audio and how course creators can deliver amazing content to their students and how Lindsay could make that happen.

She talks about breaking down barriers in a male-dominated space, learning things in the tech space, raising money, deciding to bootstrap or not, and everything in between. And then at the end of the episode, we talk about what Hello Audio actually is and how you as a service-based business owner, online course creator, educator, could use this platform to better your customer experience and to add more value. You get a peek into the stuff that Abagail and Emylee have been thinking about doing in their business and ideas for what you can use in your own one to help you grow and create an amazing experience for the people you already have.

Today, we have two of our good friends and product-based business gurus on the show. First up is Rachel Allene, who Abagail met years ago at a creative entrepreneur conference. They have stayed friends, and Abagail has watched her hand calligraphy business grow into what it is today. She makes all kinds of products that are not necessarily handmade but rather, hand-lettered. We're comparing and contrasting that with our other guest, Emylee's friend, Mia Graves. We are so excited to hear from her because we love the way her marketing and business brain works. She has two different business models because she makes polymer clay earrings and also sells cutters for polymer clay makers.

In this episode, we are breaking down a deliberate sellout, restock model strategy and the mentality behind it, why it works, why it's hard sometimes, who it's right for, and the pros and cons both for you as the maker and for the customer. We hear about the journeys Rachel and Mia have been on and the slight tweaks they have made to their selling mechanisms, strategies, and marketing in order to please more people and not go absolutely insane. This roundtable discussion will give you some really great insights into the product world. You have asked for more product-focused content, and this information is coming from two very smart women.

Today we get to talk about one of our favorite things — meetings the Traction way! While most people hate meetings, we are going to share a few things that might change your mind. Meetings are notorious for consuming a lot of time, often with little real progress, but we will present you with an outline that will make your every meeting from here on out a super productive, efficient one. We’ve spoken about the book Traction many times, but we want to remind you once more to go read it because this is where this outline and our guidelines around meetings come from.

Sometimes a meeting is not necessary and a Slack message or quick update will suffice, but other times having a meeting makes sense, and therefore it’s important to know how to approach them. Having a weekly meeting keeps all parties fully informed on decisions that were made, as it can be easy to think that everybody is in the loop when they’re not. If you are someone who has little patience for inefficiency and is always looking for the quickest, most productive ways to communicate and do things, this outline is perfect for you! This is as applicable to small teams as it is big ones, and don’t hesitate to ask your contractor to attend these meetings. Be sure to tune in to this episode to get the best strategy for efficient meetings!