We’re in the final quarter of the year and it’s the perfect time to hunker down, focus, and refine. This is the season to investigate what’s working in your business and what’s not so you can make strategic and educated improvements going into the next year. In preparation, you’re going to need to start collecting data in order to identify your greatest areas of opportunity and gauge where to place your focus.

This past week, we walked through a quarterly optimization training with our clients, and today, we want to share some of the conversations we had there so you can learn from them and apply the takeaways to your own business. In this episode, you’ll find out how one of our clients increased her close rate by 40% and where she discovered she needed to place her focus once her sales process was in order.

Tune in to find out which metrics are worth analyzing, how to pitch up to a planning session, and much more, including some tangible tips for improving your sales strategy!

Today, we want to share with you some behind-the-scenes live action of the “tweaking and repeating” that we do whenever we implement something new in our business. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve probably heard us talk about this concept before. As a refresher, “tweaking and repeating” means to take a particular action in your business for a set amount of time (at least 30 days) and then go back and reflect. Think about how it went, how it made you feel, and if there are any opportunities for you to pivot and improve what you’ve tried.

Listen in as we discuss a rundown of our “tweak and repeat” process on something that we started exactly 30 days ago. We’re going to go through the results, the things we want to keep doing, and the things we want to change. We’re showing you an example, so that you can go through the same assessment process in your own business.

Most of us have a set of preconceived notions about what it takes to grow and scale our businesses. We’re often convinced that in order to make more money we need more clients, which means we need to grow our team. But we can’t grow our team until we have more money. The situation can feel impossible and even send you on a doom-spiral of dread. But it doesn’t need to be this way! Sometimes all you need is a new perspective and a gentle nudge in the right direction. In today’s episode, we share the incredible story of our wonderful client, Bonnie.

We unpack how the Incubator Program helped her understand her business, readjust her pricing structure, and transform her life and her company in the process. We take a deep dive into the preconceived notions around growing and scaling your business, and how small shifts can bring about dramatic changes. Discover how Bonnie managed to double her revenue in five months, find ease within her business, and take a 10-day vacation in Costa Rica, without a laptop! We’ve loved seeing the Incubator community grow, and it’s so rewarding to see members flourish, share, and support one another. Tune in to learn more about the program and how it helped Bonnie transform her business!

A couple of episodes ago, we teased at the end that we were already going into what could be a whole other conversation. This is that conversation. We are going to be sharing some tidbits we have learned and have deliberately decided to do or not to do in Boss Project, and within our side businesses, to seek growth and to keep our business and our companies in the range we want them to be. This is based on what we do and don’t want to do in that job. We know this sounds confusing but stick with us, and we will break it all down. We really want you to go and listen to episode 512 because at the end we start this conversation, so it might make a little more sense to listen to that one first.

In this episode, we’re excited to do the profit report for April because we don’t know about y’all, but for us, April felt much better than March. When the pandemic first escalated in the US mid-March, everyone was freaking out and didn’t know what to expect. But when April swung by, people got more accustomed to the changes and things started coming into a rhythm again. Businesses were pivoting and finding ways to keep at least a portion of their income steady. We decided to lean into what was already working—to focus on what was performing well naturally. We could easily have tried new things but instead, we stayed focused on growing the shop rather than pushing our $2,000 signature program—which would have been a hard sell in the context of an uncertain economy.

In contrast, the Creative Template Shop is a $47 commitment that helps people with their marketing, which they desperately need now to stay afloat. But for us to approach the crisis with the focus and energy that we are, we needed to make some good choices early on. We avoided mindlessly consuming media and thought carefully about how we were spending our time and who we were surrounding ourselves with. Negativity was the order of the day but we just decided we weren’t going to get sucked into it. This shift in headspace had a huge impact on our business because we spent less time worrying and poured more time into what was already working. In this episode, we once again tell it all—and we are thrilled with the results!

It feels like it’s been 87 months since February, both in business and life, but we are going back in time to revisit that month and stay consistent with our profit reports. We’ve heard that these episodes are super helpful to you. For those who are unfamiliar with profit reports, we started them in August of 2019, sharing not income reports but profit reports, including the exact percentages of gains, losses, and so on. Our goal is to chase higher profit margins and we share what that looks like for us and the processes we go through to get there. These episodes give you a peek into our business, which will hopefully encourage and help you in setting up your strategies without any comparisons.

Today we talk about how we used the Five Days to Launch challenge to feed Strategy Academy, why we’re okay with Trello for Business breaking even, how The Creative Template Shop blew our socks off, and why we are permitting you to pivot a little right now! Intending to double down on this learning experience, we will also be hosting a live workshop to practically guide you to implement the same things in your business. Stay tuned till the end to hear where to go to learn more about crunching the numbers!

So, we have a crazy idea! We’re excited and nervous about it and can’t wait to share with you. We have big dreams this year and yep, you guessed it. We want to take you on our journey to $100k per month. We recently came to the conclusion that making this amount of money every month is realistically quite doable for us at this point. We have formulated some new strategies, broken down more of our goals and in the next few weeks, we’re going to be pushing to make our $100k month a reality.

In this episode, we will be sharing with you how this dream came about and delving into the shifts of our money mindset, our questions and fears and why money is amoral and much like a brick. We want to open up the conversation about money with you and encourage you to examine your own money mindset. So, by the end of this episode, you should feel more comfortable talking about money, dreaming big and feeling less guilty about wanting more money – if that is what you truly want.

Hey ya’ll! Today we wanted to take you back to our most popular episode ever, and it happens to be one from the very beginning where Abbie shares her story and tells you all about her journey before Think Creative Collective was born. Abagail graduated from Kansas State University with a degree in Fine Art in Graphic Design and a minor in Business Administration. Before the launch of TCC, Abbie had an incredible five plus years of business and design experience accelerating companies of all shapes and sizes. Inside this episode she also shares about her time running her free lance design business.

One of the most amazing stories is how, within 30 days of getting the pink slip, she was able to completely replace her corporate income. Wow! Before the inevitable moment came along, Abbie created a website and started blogging five days a week. Eventually she grew her own business and worked day and night to find success. So if you are just starting out in the business world and you haven’t heard her Abbie’s story of how she went from getting laid off in the corporate world to replacing her cushy corporate income within just 30 days, you are in for a treat! So put on those slippers, bust out the coffee and enjoy this throwback episode.

Boss babes, you are in for a treat today. We are doing what we normally do after a launch. We are giving you all the nitty gritty details you won’t hear anywhere else. You are going to hear about ad spend, what we did, what we didn’t do, how much we made, and all of what happened in our most recent launch, which happens to be an affiliate launch for someone else’s course (not even our own program), that we just wrapped up in July 2017. If you have no clue what we’re talking about, go back to some of our older podcasts and give them a listen.

After having so much success with FB Everything, we thought it would be beneficial for our audience to hear how we went about doing an affiliate launch. We spent money on marketing someone else’s program and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, so if you’re even a tiny bit curious, keep listening!

Wondering about how to rock it in your product based business? Well, then this is the episode for you. We are so excited to have Emily Ley from The Simplified Planner on the podcast today. She brings a fresh perspective, shares some incredible nuggets of wisdom and really dives into her ever-evolving business. We’re going to answer some of y’alls biggest burning questions about product based businesses, how they run and how they work.

You are going to hear about blogging for a product based business, the honest truth about wholesale, cash flow, predicting inventory, and seeking grace not perfection. So get ready, we’re going to get started!

Have you ever wondered how people bounce back from a layoff? How are others able to take this unfortunate event and create their own path? Well, in today’s episode you’re hearing from one of your hosts, Abagail Pumphrey on just that. Specifically how she was able to also replace her corporate income in 30 days with her side-hustle.  |  The Strategy Hour Podcast  |  From Think Creative Collective