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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

What does it mean to cultivate a culture of curiosity? That’s what we’re going to be discussing today! “Culture of curiosity” isn’t just a fun phrase. It starts with the way you talk about your work with all the people who are in your support system. It should be all-encompassing because if you use different language with different people it can derail you (in our opinion).

One of the very first switches that we made when we were first growing our team was to speak openly with our team members about the things that we used to only speak about during our private conversations. As soon as we started thinking out loud, and sharing our fears and excitement with the people around us, they could see the evolution in our thought patterns which is such a valuable and inclusive tool!

As much as we’d love to wave a magic wand and bestow confidence upon others, unfortunately, confidence isn’t something you can gift to other people. It’s often so much easier said than done, but we’ve whittled down a list of things you can do to create your own confidence if you weren’t naturally born with it or nurtured in that area! Confidence can be created, it can be learned. In this episode, we look at how our respective upbringings allowed us to forge confidence and create the lifestyles of our choosing, and how you, too, can nurture your confidence and change your beliefs!

The theme of needing more time is a common one that we are seeing amongst our clients, which is why we started off today’s conversation with a discussion about gardening and candle making! Our thoughts on this topic have changed a lot over the last 6 months because of the unexpected outcomes that we’ve witnessed, and we want to share them with you.

Our advanced training is called “How to Double Your Income by Working 20 Hours a Week or Less.” Service providers, we see you, we know you’re burnt out, and our goal is to help you make more money and get your time back! Our strategy works, we have proof through the lives that have been changed as a result, so come and see how it can change your life too!

Having discovery calls, going for coffee dates, and holding pitching meetings with potential clients is something that we’ve noticed that many service-based business owners struggle with in the early years. They feel like they either don’t say enough or they say too much, and this causes a lot of stress and anxiety. In this episode, we want to equip you with the confidence to go into these scenarios feeling like you know exactly what you’re doing!

After serving clients one-on-one, we ultimately changed the entire landscape of our business, yet we didn’t even realize that’s what we were doing! If we could go back in time, there are so many things we would do differently, and today, we’re going to share them with you. When we got to a certain stage of business, we froze up and felt like we were on an island. We had no idea what the next step should be and it felt like everyone else had all of the answers. So many of our clients reach the same phase where they hit a milestone marker and feel like there's something that they’re missing, like a missing piece of information; a formula, or a blueprint.

If you feel like million-dollar businesses are gatekeeping this information, the truth is, some of them are! If you’re at the stage of hitting a quarter of a million dollars and don’t know where to go from here, we’re here to tell you. Consider us your Fairy Godmothers of Business Past, telling you your future so you can really decipher what you want to focus on in this phase! Tune in to find out which things you’re tying to success that need to be let go.

As most of our listeners at Boss Project know, Abagail is our CFO and sits in HR as well. She has worked hand in hand with plenty of amazing people in HR to learn about the hiring process for a company. She has single-handedly shifted her team from just Emylee and Abagail, to exploring contractors, part-time employees, full-time employees, and pretty much everything in between! Inside the incubator, she has started to have conversations about hiring, and she has plenty of wisdom to share from all of this experience.

Most business owners struggle with follow-through. The reason why Boss Project has been successful is that where Abagail struggles to see things through, Emylee excels! This formula, along with having the team to support it, has been a winning recipe for us. If you’re a solo business owner, you could be leaving money on the table for this reason. That’s where the magic of having help, even for ten to fifteen hours a month, comes in.

Aside from our wonderful clients in the incubator, our DMs have been popping and we have so many great insights into the hurdles that service-based businesses are facing! One particular issue that continues to pop up, especially as we help people define a high-touch signature service or ultimately focus on a more primary offering (instead of having what we’ve lovingly called the Cheesecake Factory menu of offers), is the need to eliminate other services. Many people we’ve run into are open to the idea but have active clients utilizing those very services and don’t know how to make that transition. The question arises of how to pivot and how to communicate the changes, but the main risk factor that people dwell on is losing the income from those active clients. Well, in this episode, you’ll find out how to gently ease out of specific services with a transition plan, as well as how to inform your clients that you’re eliminating part of their service and raising their price. Tune in to hear why there is no question that you shouldn’t only offer the services you want to and how to get to a point where you’re billing ethically and creating space for rest and creativity!