new episodes tuesdays + thursdays
If you run a business online, then this is the show for you. Listen in as your host, Abagail Pumphrey delivers semi-ranty business strategies touching on everything from building a profitable offer to scaling sustainably to growing an ethical culture and everything in between.
top 10 business podcast | 4 Million+ downloads | 750+ episodes
Meet Your Host
Semi-ranty business strategies for successful small business owners.
Hey, it’s your host, Abagail Pumphrey. And I’m on a personal mission to help more small business owners become financially free.
I like to nerd out on all things business, marketing, and most definitely the numbers. I’m talking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a 7-figure online business.
I like to share it all and no conversation is off the table. We talk actionable strategies, biz challenges, and all the things life throws your way - grief, anxiety, loss, and resilience are all topics you’ll find here.
Our Best Hits
Our Favorite Tools
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The Creative Template Shop is loaded with every template your business needs to succeed. Get started by downloading your next Client Proposal, our member-favorite Services and Pricing Guide, social media templates, or Dubsado forms—just to name a few! You can purchase templates one-off, or get the best deal on all the templates by becoming a shop member!
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This is the #1 tool that we recommend to all our service provider clients. Dubsado is a business management solution designed to cut out the busywork. Build relationships, schedule appointments, and create workflows to streamline your projects from start to finish. Onboard clients, set up automations, send contracts, accept payments and more with this robust system.
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If you’d rather not be spending hours on end learning design skills and new programs just to make some graphics for your biz - definitely check out Canva. Even as professionally trained designers, we made the switch years ago simply with how easy Canva is to use. Save your brand kit, unlock magic resize, get unlimited storage, download designs with transparent backgrounds and more with Pro!
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If you’re looking for an email service provider made with creatives in mind that is simple and intuitive, look no further than Flodesk. We got tired of email formatting being a coding how-to and let’s not talk about the monthly cost. Flodesk’s drag and drop features make formatting emails a breeze, plus it’s one set price no matter if your list is 1,000 subscribers or 100,000. Try it out today!
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No website? No problem. If simplicity is key for your business, we suggest utilizing Leadpages as your landing page, sales page, opt-in page and more. It’s drag-and-drop design makes it easy for beginners to design something on brand + quick so you can get your business out there ASAP.
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A visual-first planning tool for social media. Use it for Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Plan, Schedule and Post with this all-in-one software. Stay up to date with hashtags and trends so you can analyze and optimize your strategy. Manage a linkin.bio within Later to direct your audience to the places that really matter —your website or checkout links.
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Communication is the secret sauce to successful high-touch client experiences. Simple Texting allows you to fire one-off messages, a series of messages in an automation, tag clients and more. Back up your regular email communication with text messages to create a wholistic experience.
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Host digital products, courses, coaching, memberships, and more on Teachable’s all-in-one platform. Their no-code platform is perfect for businesses who want to create real impact. We've used Teachable to sell millions of dollars in digital products & courses. It has allowed us to work with more than 30,607+ students, ensuring a quality experience and better results for our clients.
We may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases. However, this does not impact our reviews or comparisons.
Featured Series
A Few Hot Takes
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Listener Love
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My Favorite Podcast!
Not only is their show super entertaining, it is packed FULL of amazing content and learnings that I have tried with success. PLUS their authentic and real interactions in instagram DMs really proved to me that they truly care and are here to help and support in this noisy world of people hustling to get your attention. I can’t recommend this show enough!
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Great Insights
Invaluable information on starting a business, building a brand, etc. They are relatable and easy to listen too. There’s no useless fluff or bragging, just full to the brim with good info. Listen to be inspired!
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Thank you for your realness!
As a perfectionist who always “shoulds” on myself, I want to THANK YOU for the practical business advice and for keeping it real! After listening to an episode, I feel ready to tackle the next step... instead of feeling completely overwhelmed. Thank you both for your honesty. It helps me set better goals, reflect more truthfully, and actually get stuff done!
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Real guidance and conversations
Abagail and Emylee keep it real. I love their focus on helping creative entrepreneurs to build a soul-fulfilling and profitable business. We don’t get that kind of guidance in university or from our parents (at least, I didn’t!) and it’s invaluable. The conversations these two hosting about empowering women and shifting the conversation in the entrepreneur community are so important.
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Entertaining, insightful, and actionable! 🔥
Whether you’re well established as an entrepreneur, or just getting started carving out a profitable niche that’s ready to grow—this is a must-listen podcast for you! Abagail and Emylee do an incredible job leading conversations that cover a huge breath of topics related to the ins and outs of building a thriving business - and life you can be proud of - with leaders who’ve actually experienced success themselves.
How to Plan for Unplanned Time Off
Today we’re talking about unanticipated leave. We’ve spent a good amount of episodes talking about how to prepare for maternity leave or a longer vacation or break, both of which are amazing! But for the most part, these are eventualities that you can anticipate and plan around. So what do you do to prepare for things that you can’t anticipate like family emergencies or medical leave?
This year we have both had major health challenges as well as family emergencies that left us unable to work for days and weeks at a time. These events were stressful in themselves. But, had we not taken the necessary steps to prepare for unanticipated leave, things could have been a lot more dire and overwhelming, especially for our team. To find out whether you’ve prepared your business for unplanned time off, make sure you tune in for our breakdown on how to elevate your systems, build better communication, and plan for unplanned time off!
Does Your Service-Based Business Have a Sounding Board?
Believe it or not, change and growth are possible without you being in a perpetual state of despair. Crisis can’t be the only impetus for scaling your business; we strongly believe that you can seek expansion when things are going well!
In this episode, we break down the “Cycle of Despair” and the traps many service-based business owners fall into when they’re seeking to grow their businesses. If you are caught in the cycle of not having enough cash to bring in the support you need to land more clients and not enough clients to bring in the cash you need, we’re here to offer you a new approach.
How to Thrive in Maintenance Mode So You Can Be Set Up for Growth
All too often, business owners will be trucking along just fine, reaching their goals and generating profits, but that inner feeling of urgency never quite goes away. This is a little easier to justify early on in business. We think of this as the honeymoon phase, but for business. You see all this potential, and your vision is strong.
Growing something is way more exciting than maintaining something. We don’t give enough credit to the outside validation that you get when you first take the leap and start something new. Oftentimes, if you’re fueled by that, you end up staying significantly smaller than your potential because you keep starting over instead of adding or growing. Is there a better way to approach that feeling of wanting to start all over again?
How to Recession Proof Your Service Based Business
We’re collectively going through what is likely to be the next recession. Nobody has officially called it yet, but it seems to us like that’s the direction we’re heading, or that we’re already in it. Because many other people feel the same way, they are changing their behaviors. So, today we are going to be talking about what it looks like to recession-proof your business! Maybe you weren’t in business during the last recession, so you don’t know what to expect, or you’re used to consistent success, so the slower market has come as a bit of a shock; whatever situation you’re in currently, we’re going to make you feel more at ease and give you some practical advice for how to approach the coming months and years.
The 4 Things a Service Provider Must Get Right: Part Two Making Sure the Deliverables are Profitable
In part two of our series on the four things every service provider must get right, we’re talking about money! Particularly, we are talking about profitability. If you want a business that allows you to sleep and see your friends, and maybe even take a vacation, you need to be paying attention to the piece of your business that determines if your deliverables are profitable.
What does it take to really run your service fully? Can you identify what projects are bringing in the most profit for your business? Do you operationally know where you might have some of those ‘cherry on top’ niceties that you might be able to fund in a different or unique way?
At the end of the day, if you don’t have money to fund the business that you are running, you are not going to have a business to run. We want you to not only have a business to run, but we want your business to fund the life that you want to have, and that’s literally our whole mission over at Boss Project!
4 Things a Service Provider Must Get Right: Part One Identify Your Result
We are bringing you a series! It’s going to be a four-part series dropping on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next two weeks. In it, we’re going to be covering the four things that a service provider must get right. The reason why we’re launching this particular series is because we’re surprised, year after year, about the lack of higher-level resources geared towards the tens of thousands of people who listen to this show, namely established business owners who are looking to figure out their next move for their business, so that they can level up. So, we’re creating those foundational resources for you in the form of a podcast series. We’re so excited to dig in, come join us!
How Team Boss Project Lives in Our Life-First Value
Our very first absolute priority when it comes to our business values, is building a business that is life first. To us, that means that our business structure reflects the season we are in. Seasons can be short or long, but they are intentional choices. You can choose to work full time, build a business, and still respect life first.
What this looks like for us, is allowing ourselves plenty of flexibility even while working full-time hours. When we chose to do business this way, we structured our days in a way where we could still prioritize family and life over work. How it looks is not the point, how it is communicated, and how it is honored, are! Life first looks completely different in every different context - what our team looks like when we’re working, what our team looks like when we are not working. Open and early communication is the essential building block for a life-first business to thrive.
We’ve made it a rule that every single employee has to take both their birthday and their anniversary off from work. That’s just one example of how we’ve built the life-first value into our business, and we’re proud of it! Building a life-first business can look any way you want it to, and it can be the little things, and ultimately our goal is that you have the freedom to choose what you want to prioritize and how that works.
How Your Service Pricing Changes When You Choose to Have a Team
For those of you who have reached the point of hitting your first or second six figures and are beginning to tap out of what you personally do within your business, there’s a conversation that needs to be had. A lot of people decide to ditch their current offers for an entirely different set of offers because they think that’s the only way to move up, however, we think pricing is a great opportunity to expand. Oftentimes, the clients that work with us in the Incubator can work with fewer people and make more money, if they’re priced appropriately. But something we don’t see happening as much as it should, is people moving to a premium pricing model to set them up to grow their team. Tune in to discover how to grow your team ethically, calculate appropriate service pricing, and why you might be pricing inappropriately, to begin with!
The 2 Ingredients Needed for a Successful Service Based Business
Coming your way today is a mix of math and anticipatory mindset work! It’s all through the lens of, “This is what you actually want.” We’re going to lay out the future a little bit for you so that you can start to understand what’s coming and that you can stop stressing about it! We’re seeing hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are constantly apologizing for doing things they don’t want to do. After today, we want you to understand why you shouldn’t be feeling bad about things like not posting consistently on social media, and what you should be putting energy into instead!
Designing Your CEO + Creative Director Role
What would it look like to remove yourself from the parts of the business that you should remove yourself from? And which parts should you never remove yourself from? Are there opportunities you’re ignoring because of this?
When you give up these things, we can only imagine that, in your heart of hearts, you want to lean more into the CEO role - you just don’t know yet exactly what you’re supposed to be doing with that time. But once you know more about what’s required of you within that role, you might find the motivation to let go of these other parts of the business, and by doing so, gain some very precious time back!
We Don't Set Goals Anymore, Here’s Why
Today, we’re going to fill you in on our hot take on setting goals! We are now seven years into our business and have hit tremendous milestones. That being said, our feelings towards goals have evolved over time, and we’re about to give you some insight into our retrospective thoughts on setting them, not setting them, and whether we feel worthiness is connected to goals. For six-figure earners who want to continue to scale their business, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen in terms of your relationship with goals, and we’re here to tell you what that is! Tune in to hear our current take on goal setting, and find out about the TikTok that inspired this conversation.
What Does a CEO Actually Do
It’s taken us over a year to understand how our roles as co-CEOs of our company are different from the other aspects of our jobs and what exactly a CEO actually does. We’re still in the process of figuring out how to balance being CEOs, managers, and “doers” but we’re getting there! In this episode, we will be talking about what being a CEO entails, the tasks you should always be in control of, and those which you can delegate to other team members at a certain point along your journey.
How Premium Services Function Differently For B2B vs. B2C Businesses
Speaking to hundreds of people on a regular basis about their business has given us so much insight into which structures work for which industries. It’s what positions us to advise clients entering the incubator who find themselves at a fork in the road of how to move forward. We want to give you some guidance, and let you know what we would do if we were in your shoes.
None of these options are wrong, it’s all centered around what works best for you, what feels fun, and what facilitates you playing to your strengths. There are plenty of scenarios that work amazingly for some people, and don’t work at all for others. The question to focus on is not what is right, and what gets the greatest return, but what feels attainable for you. If something is not in step with who you are as a person, it’s not going to work!
Boss Project is Closing … For Our 1st Summer Break — Here's How We Made it Happen
This year, for the first time ever, Boss Project is taking a summer break! We’ve taken vacations in the past, and while we’ve navigated time off before, this time is different. This year we have a full staff of nine employees, who will all be taking time off, and the company will be closed for two entire weeks! In today’s episode, we walk you through the steps we’ve taken to prepare for our time off and show you how any business can prepare for a substantial and regenerative summer break.
Tuning in you’ll hear us break down how we’ve structured our work and our launches around designated time off, why we chose to do it this way, and what we’re planning to do for our break. We unpack some of the logistical steps we’re taking to maintain communication while we’re off, and why we wanted to prioritize our staff and give everyone a chance to rest and get away from it all. Thank you for joining us as we prepare for our summer break and discuss what it means to be a life-first business!
What Does Scaling Mean to You? Here's What You Need to Do Before Going Into a Growth Phase
Today we are going to have a fabulous conversation! When working with our current clients inside The Incubator we always talk about levers. What lever do you need to pull in order to get the result that you want? There aren’t actually that many levers that you have the option of pulling but people like to complicate things. We are here to simplify them for you! Sometimes the things that people think they need to do to scale and grow are actually just the opposite of what they should be doing.
This conversation is all about what you should be thinking about before you start scaling. We want to give you insights into what scaling looks like in reality, so that you can decide if scaling your business really is something you want to do at this current stage of your journey.
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Could your neurodivergence be the key to unlocking your entrepreneurial superpower? Today I’m joined by Skye Waterson; a former academic-turned-coach, podcast host, and founder of Unconventional Organisation. Unconventional Organisation is an international ADHD support service that provides research-backed coaching programs for late-diagnosed professionals looking to go to the next level in their career without burnout.