As a business owner, you will unlock different tiers of problems that you need to solve. While working with folks inside the Incubator, we’ve encountered many questions that we would categorize as ‘next level.’ We realized we have a lot we can help those people with. That’s what’s led us to introduce a brand new offer. We are so excited to talk about our new opportunity for people!

These are people who entered the Incubator, thinking that the next step for them was to start hiring more people. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t that! Instead, we worked with them on refining their offer so that they could start getting paid appropriately. Once they start getting those achievable results, they’re in the position to start looking for more people to hire.

Many of our Incubator graduates reach a point where they slowly want to remove themselves from some of the deliverables of their service. They want to be involved with strategy and direction, but they’re ready for everything else to fall to their team. They’re ready for the next phase, and this can be intimidating! This is not less work for them. In fact, at first, it’s more work. After that, it’s different work.

This isn’t about removing your job from the business. It’s shifting your focus to different aspects of the business. It will require you to grow and evolve as a manager, leader, and CEO. You’re going to go from just being the person who founded the business to sitting in a true CEO or leader’s seat. It’s such an exciting thing for us to see!

We have been seeing many frustrating things in the business world lately, so today, we talk about marketing ploys and business strategies that we don’t align with. We strongly believe that if you work with a coach, you should ensure that that person lives their life and runs their business in a way that aligns with your belief system so that you can create a life and a business that you really, truly want.

If you’re a true crime fan and you enjoy a scandalous story about fraud, you’ve definitely spent some time thinking about people who are bigger visioning. These are people who started by looking at the end result, instead of asking themselves what they can do today. While we’re definitely not advocating for crime, we totally believe that there’s great benefit to be had when you consider the big picture of your business! Legacy planning doesn’t mean you’re not invested in your business today; it just means you’re building with the future in mind, and that can only benefit you, both today AND in the long term.

We’ve seen people invest so much into their business only to realize that the success of their business rests solely on their ability to keep it afloat. Creating systems, training staff, and starting with the end in mind are all powerful tools to help your business to thrive even once you have made your exit. We’re in the business of helping you to make the changes you need to make to create a sustainable business plan that will enable you to thrive today, and to continue to flourish after you eventually leave! So, tune in today to find out more about creating a retirement plan for your business!

As owners and CEOs, we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but we’ve also learned a lot from them. In today’s episode, we discuss some of the mistakes we’ve made, as well as the errors we’ve seen TONS of CEOs make over the years. So, if you recognize any of these in yourself, don’t worry, you’re in good company! Tuning in, you’ll hear us break down the 7 most prominent red flags and toxic behaviors that continue to happen in business. Learn how to recognize them, why they happen, and the tiny course corrections you can make to solve them.

The things that we are pointing out today are based on specific lessons we’ve observed throughout our careers. We’ve seen these errors play out in various ways, from friends who have needed to course-correct, to mistakes that we have inadvertently made in our own business. We’re taking this as an opportunity to share our knowledge so that you can become aware of these potential pitfalls and hopefully skip them altogether!

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you might be under the impression that the hosts get along just fine. You’re right! When there are just two people, conflict is a lot less complicated, and a lot easier to resolve. Around two weeks into having a bigger team, we noticed that everyone would look to us for the answers, never contesting our conclusions. Different perspectives, backgrounds and insights all help us to make better decisions as a company. Abagail and Emylee want to make it really clear that not only do they not want to make all the decisions, but they actually believe that would be a really bad idea! That’s where conflict is necessary for the business to grow and thrive.

We always knew there would be this moment where, after doing these profit reports, we would eventually hit our goal, and then we would have to have the conversation about what’s next for us. We alluded to it a bit last month, where we had our first loss in over a year, but no part of Abagail was concerned. It sounds bizarre, but we really stuck things out, made some subtle shifts, and March went fantastically. What a concept! We had a loss and didn’t let it linger in our brains for months on end, which, in turn, would have impacted our business for months on end.

Instead, we did a turnaround and saw some amazing stuff happen for us in March. It's funny because it’s not like we did this massive launch or any other big things. We just checked the calendar right before we recorded this to remind ourselves of what happened last month. We planned some stuff; we talked about some stuff; we did a mini-thing, well, someone else did a mini-thing; we invested in some stuff. That's about it! It was lowkey in terms of what was happening behind the scenes. But so much of what we have been doing over the last year has been about building our monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

When you start the hiring process it can be a challenging time with a lot to think about. There are a lot of decisions to be made about how or why you hire someone at a certain point in your business. We have talked about it in the past but today we want to talk about why it is important that you think first about how and where you will get a return on your hire rather than hiring to save time. This is because we know what hiring to save time looks like and we are in a different space to be able to talk about it. So many people only hire to save time and they should be thinking about it in a bigger way.

We want to have this conversation coming from the space of how we think about it now with Boss Project and lessons we have learned, but also there are one-off hires that Emylee has done for her earring business. She hired for stuff she knew she would save a ton of time on. She also wasn’t the best one to do these tasks and if they were done, she would make money faster. So it is interesting how this question of hiring can be viewed in different scopes based on where you are at in your business.

Hello friends! It has been a minute since we have talked about the other businesses we run. We thought it was high time for a little update because Abagail has something new and exciting that she has launched (by the time you hear this it will have been out for a minute). We are going to talk about that but we also think there have been some decisions that we have made very intentionally in our side businesses that we want to break down the logistics behind.

We share these things with you, first of all, because it is fun to chat about, but it is also fair for you guys to hear this part of the process because it gives you a look behind the curtain of something new and growing. It also shows you the reality of how a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners are, which is multi-passionate!

This is another one of those episodes where Abagail puts Emylee on the spot in front of the audience. She knows nothing and is expected to come up with something out of thin air. For context, we started our business as creative entrepreneurs and designers and all that. What we did not realize we were doing at the time was influencing people. We started this blog, we were putting out content, and ultimately, a large portion of our business has become what we would call affiliate marketing. It makes up a big percentage of what we are doing. So, Abagail has all this background knowledge of what it takes to be an influencer in an affiliate capacity and has made all of these pivots with her second brand to broaden the ways she is bringing in money for this brand. Emylee is admittedly the laziest influencer out there. It is not that she doesn’t influence people; she definitely does, and there are many examples to prove it. In technical terms, Abagail, based on the size of her audience, would be seen as a micro-influencer. There are so many people out there that want to be influencers but they don’t necessarily know what they need to be looking out for. There are some alarming things brands are starting to include in their contracts, and micro-influencers are agreeing to these things, most probably without any idea of what they actually mean. And they could not only negatively impact your business, but they could destroy your online reputation if you do not pay attention to what is going on.

For those of you who don’t already know Emylee – welcome to her anxious life. She is the type of person who can tell you where every exit in a building is, or how to stop drop and roll in case of a fire, and where to hide just in case a tornado suddenly appears on route to the mall. In business, Emylee is the kind of person that likes to go through every single worst case scenario. She always has a back up plan… and a backup plan for the backup plan. Emylee is the queen of doing this and it turns out this can be a super helpful attribute to have in a business partnership.

This episode is about planning for the things you can never plan for. It’s about answering those difficult “What if” questions. It’s about securing your business for the future and the reassurance this brings to your life. For those of you who are single business owners, we’re not sure you’ve thought of planning for worst case scenarios and exactly how to do that. So in today’s episode, we’re going to be sharing our experiences and the reasons we have made planning for worst case scenarios an integral part of our overall business strategy. We discuss buy-sell agreements, the various insurance options you have, the tough questions you need to ask yourself today and how you can effectively plan for the worst, in the best kind of way. Take a listen!

We dunno if y’all noticed, but March was weird. March was also hard, hurtful, and 7,000 times longer than January. That’s probably because March asked us to adjust to a new normal and we were still getting used to being home—all the time. And we’re not here to pretend like our situations are better or worse than anybody else’s because, like you, neither of us knew what was going to go down in 2020. What we do know is that this period will be a watershed in small business, the impact of which will likely be felt years from now.

While we don’t know how this will pan out, we can give you our March profit report and roll it out into a Q1 report in general for you guys to see how the first three months of the year went for us. You can always DM us if there is anything you want to know that we didn’t cover—we’re all here to learn together, right? In this episode, we tell you how each of our products fared, including the surprises and the disappointments we had and how we overcame certain obstacles. One thing is certain: tuning in to this episode will encourage you because we show you how reaching your goals is still possible!

Hey everybody and welcome back to the show. This is going to be a really good episode because today we are finally talking about the Human Design personality test method. We have heard such muttering about this topic and we are obsessed with personality tests in general. It’s amazing how in this Human Design model, personality is seen as something baked into who you are. You don’t get to pick or adjust over time like in other test models. It’s literally based off of your birth hour/minute/location, so you cannot change what you are.

We know very little about this topic but wanted to share what we have learned so far. Tests like the Enneagram and Myers–Briggs give you such good insight about who you are, and you can learn how to be a better person and understand your faults. The Human Design model, by contrast, can help people become more balanced through collaboration. Our conversation today is structured by running through the book Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born To Be, which helps breakdown how Human Design came about. We will talk about some of those basic principles today and how they relate to our types as business partners. Enjoy!

Our guest today, Emily Benson, is an expert in everything retail, working for companies like Abercrombie & Fitch and Club Monaco. For those who aren’t aware, 80% of boutique owners go out of business within their first two years – most often because of a lack of education. Emily’s boutique training academy is here to help lower that percentage, offering both beginner and advance coaching to people who want to grow their boutiques. But it’s not only super helpful to product-based businesses; her advice is applicable to service-based babes too, because business is business, right?

On this episode we’re talking inventory, margins, increasing profits and generally making smart business decisions based on the results you are currently getting in your business. So whether you’re selling t-shirts or courses, it’s all about paying attention to your data, customers and trends and we are going to dish out detailed strategies for exponential business growth. So buckle up, take some notes and get ready to learn a whole bunch from the boutique master herself!

Welcome to Part Three of the Goal Crusher Club Series! Today on the podcast, we are talking about the fun side of business – getting paid! Woohoo! Getting paid should be an exciting and rewarding part of business; but who knew that it could be the cause of so much anxiety and confusion, right? We want to give you a little break here today and share with you what we have used in the past to help us define what to pay ourselves as business owners and how that works for us today since our business has grown. If you have severe anxiety around money, we totally understand the fear of not wanting to pay yourself.

A lot of the time people are either afraid money is going to disappear or it is supposed to be allocated toward something else or are just simply feeling that they don’t deserve that money. This is something to be aware of going into this episode but for the most part, we are going to be diving into the different formulas you can use in order to figure out what to pay yourself. We will also be discussing helpful tools to help you with payroll, saving for taxes, saving for retirement, how to separate your income into different bank accounts and what determines a “reasonable” salary.