Originally, I wasn’t planning to share my plans for the coming year. Even though it can be tough to know what to share as someone who teaches other business owners to do what I do, I’m sharing this because I know this is going to work. I want to make sure that you have these reminders in front of you. You don’t need to make radical changes to your plans. But these ideas are truly what makes businesses in this industry scale. 

As we get ready to close out the year, it’s natural to find ourselves at an inflection point. It’s the time of the year when we think about all the things we've done, all the things we would do differently, and maybe even some things we regretted along the way.

When I sat down to reflect on the past year, I felt a deep need to remember. To revisit lessons I’d learned before but was reminded of in new, impactful ways this year. These are lessons that aren’t just for me – they’re for all of us.

Inevitably, you’re going to encounter people who simply don’t think the same way you do. Personally, it took me a long time to understand this. I always assumed that everyone problem-solved the same way, thought the same way, and came up with ideas in the same way. Like me, you might be surprised to learn that not everyone experiences inner dialogue in the same way or even at all! In fact, it’s estimated that 30 to 50% of people don’t have an “inner voice.”

The 23 lessons I am sharing today are things that come from my personal experience inside Boss Project, things I’ve observed with clients, things I’ve gone through and challenges I’ve been through, exciting things I’m leaning into this year, and things that will get you thinking about your own take on all these things!

Today’s episode is all about how to define your role in your company. As we look towards the start of a new year, we always like to comb through the job descriptions of the people on our team, as well as ourselves. What we’ve noticed is that defining the role of founders and CEOs is something that is often overlooked. So, we are intentional about taking the time to get really clear on the things that we need to do versus the things that we want to do so that we can find a healthy balance between the two!

As we look ahead to the new year, we’re evaluating what we want to take forward with us, what we’ll discontinue in the new year, and what we’d like to tentatively start investigating. Here at Boss Project, we’ve been in the throes of planning for 2023 and have settled on some decisions which we share with you in this episode! Tune in to find out what we’re carrying forward with us and why, what we’ve decided to drop, and three potential additions that we’re contemplating bringing into the mix.

If you dream of having a team full of problem solvers, you’ve come to the right place. In the previous episode, we talked about the four types of problem solvers that your team needs. In this episode, we investigate how to encourage your employees to be problem solvers in the first place. Efficiency is championed in the workplace, and the number one thing to get in the way of it is the brake of identifying and solving problems. For this reason, there is often a lot of resistance to turning the focus onto innovation. Yes, it takes time, but it’s worth it! Tune in to hear our advice on creating space for innovation and incentivizing problem-solving. We leave you with seven practical ways to promote a culture of creativity and innovation within your team!

We recently came across an article about the types of problem solvers (or innovators) that exist within a business. In this episode, we are going to be sharing a breakdown of this article. The idea is to encourage you, as a leader, to look at your team and determine whether it is diverse enough in terms of the perspectives and roles as well as whether it is cognitively diverse enough. This is such an important conversation because there are certain things that will be innately easy for some people and much harder for others and when you understand the dynamics of your team, everyone can help each other out. For anyone looking to grow their team in the coming year, this episode is for you!

Do you find hiring daunting? Do you want to find the right people that will grow your business but don't know how? Then this episode is for you! It’s been a minute since we’ve had a guest on the Strategy HourPodcast, but we absolutely had to bring our friend Abbey Ashley on so that you can hear more of what she's got going on with hiring, and get some tips from a multi million dollar CEO on how she has navigated hiring in her business, along with a few personal anecdotes from our experience over at BossProject.

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!

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.

Hi! Let’s take it back to the month of turkey days! We feel like with the holidays you quickly forget how November went, because you just roll straight into the next holiday, get distracted by family, and shopping, and cookies. Emylee promises to make Abagail some marshmallows again this year, but instead of talking about marshmallows for the whole episode which we definitely could do, we are here for another profit report!

If you are new here you should know that we now have well over a year’s worth of episodes where we share profit reports with you. We made a goal at the end of 2019 to focus more on profit – keeping more profit within our business to make more money and pay ourselves instead of reaching huge, sexy revenue goals, and our business drastically changed because of that mindset. So now, every month we share with you the breakdown of expenses, profit, where the money went – a breakdown of products in our company, so you can be inspired to do the same breakdown within yours!

How are we able to talk about the end of 2020 already? We don’t know because this has been the fastest, craziest year in life and business for us in a while. For a while, it felt like we were having the longest months, and then things just seemed to speed up. We think a lot of people have had a similar experience. We don’t know if it was because people were home and things didn’t feel like they were changing and then suddenly it was fall and then winter. And now Christmas is around the corner! How are we at this point in the year already?

So today we want to talk about 2020 specifically and what happened in our businesses. If you look at all the goals we set for 2020, how did things ultimately shape up? We will tell you, we don’t know if there were guardian angels above us but there were a few things we did really differently in Q1 that ultimately set us up for huge success, and in today’s show you will hear all about it!

On today’s show, we talk to Rachel Rodgers, the CEO of Hello Seven. Previously, she was an intellectual property lawyer but today she is a business coach who helps women hit seven figures without sacrificing their home lives and sanity. Rachel works with entrepreneurs and helps them create and protect their own intellectual property to scale their business to $1million and beyond. She has worked with The New York Times bestselling authors, tech startups, coaches, consultants, doctors, accountants, nutritionists, and more.

In this episode, we talk not only about a healthy growth mentality and seven-figure mindset, but also about diversity, inclusion, and equity, and how deciding to have those as a priority in your business is smart and strategic. Rachel gives heaps of takeaways for listeners to implement in their businesses today, and suggests some resources for finding people to begin to expand your circle.

Can you believe it? The year 2019 is over and we’re starting 2020 in just a few hours! We’re talking about our New Year’s Eve plans and how Emylee is going to navigate a house full of party people – thanks to marrying a frat guy who has a million friends! But speaking about plans to enter the new year on a high note, today we share with you our biggest lessons from 2019 and how they should impact your (and our) strategies for 2020. Tricky situations are unavoidable, and we offer you some solid advice for mitigating their potentially negative effects. 

As business owners, we are required to keep learning and developing all the time – otherwise, we simply won’t be able to keep up and we’d never reach our full potential. There are logistics and technicalities you must deal with at some point, whether it’s your thing or not, because entrepreneurs and business owners need to fulfill a multitude of roles and responsibilities. We reckon you can give yourself a pat on the back for what you have achieved in your business this year. It’s not easy, and it takes a lot of grit. Join us for this last episode of 2019 to hear more about break-even points, short-term sacrifices, distractions, and a whole lot more!