Today on the show we welcome Abbey Ashley, founder of The Virtual Savvy. Abbey is a virtual assistant startup coach who is helping women all over the world start their online businesses and launch and grow their VA businesses to $5,000 per month and beyond! Ashley has been featured on Boss Mom, Smart Passive Income and NBC News – so you can image, this girl knows her sh*t! If you’re someone who can’t stand the 9-5 life, being a VA is a great place to start for anyone who is wanting to get their feet wet in the online world.

For anyone who is stuck, not knowing where or how to even begin tapping into the online VA space, this is literally the episode for you. In this episode, Abbey provides so many fantastic ideas for you to get something off the ground as well as how to pivot, niche and scale your VA business so that you can totally crush it. After listening to this episode, you will be able to start making money this very week! So, take some notes and let’s get started.

June was the most slap in the face lesson that Emylee has ever had in business. Abbie, on the other hand, felt like we had it coming. But no matter which way you see it, we’re going to talk about it – and many other delicious things – today in our June Review episode. This June, we launched The Strategy Academy live for the first time since November 2017. We have evergreened the program for the past six months and this launch was to give us a big public push. We did have a successful live launch but it did not reach the goals that we had set.

In this episode, we reflect on the process and the results of our Strategy Academy relaunch and highlight some of the latest changes and additions to TCC. We have some exciting things coming up for July, which we’ll share with you too, and round things off with some strategy, pancakes and spaghetti. By end of this episode, you’ll be reminded that sometimes you don’t need to burn your projects but rather, speak about them in a different way.

Today on the show we welcome Brit Kolo of Jam Marketing Group. Brit is a feel good marketing coach, accountability partner, abundance junkie and hugger of all things plants. Brit coaches boxed-in business owners to become independent, profitable leaders through self-awareness and #MarketingThatFeelsGood. In this episode, we’re diving into all things personality type and this corresponds to marketing plans. Brit believes that you shouldn’t have to feel fake and sales-y in order to grow your business.

By knowing your personality type and using that as a home base for your marketing strategy, she believes that you can truly create marketing that feels good for you. Here we break down what types of things feel good for certain personalities and what things might make us feel icky and uncomfortable, so that you can lean into the thing that is going to help you market faster, better and stronger. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a good sense of how you can make selling feel so right for you in your business.

Today’s podcast is really special retrospective as we are looking back on our meetaversary! We met three years ago and those of you who have been with use for a while, know just how special the journey we have made together has been! So we thought we would take this opportunity to look back on the last three years and really just pay tribute to each other and what we have achieved. Although it has not all been smooth sailing and easy terrain the good times have made the challenges that much more manageable. Through all the ups and downs that life has thrown at us, this business we have built together is a blessing and we are both so grateful for it!

We remember exactly how we first met and the first conversations we in the Savvy Community and the phone calls and sleepovers that followed. Once we spent time together we knew it was something special and the honesty we were able to exercise so quickly really showed us how rare our connection was. Very soon after meeting we started to see how we balanced each other out and complemented each other’s strengths and weakness. We hope everyone out there gets to feel this great feeling! We look back at some of the best and worst memories from this period and look forward to what the future might hold. This episode is a bit gushy and is all about us - but we know you care, otherwise you wouldn’t be here! And who doesn’t need a little bit more inspirations and gratefulness in their lives?

Hey ya’ll! It’s our May review / June planning session coming to you live from Emylee’s very dirty office. In this episode, we go over some of the things we accomplished and didn’t accomplish in May, some of our daring plans for June and let you in on a little big secret… This June we will be bringing you the biggest launch you have ever witnessed at TCC and share some of our exciting new sponsorship prospects on the horizon.

We also share some successful news from our grueling switch over to Active Campaign and reveal why we deleted 21k subscribers from our list and are as cool as cucumbers about it. We also share the changes we have made to the business with GDPR compliance and why vanity numbers really don’t mean a thing. By the end of this episode, you will have a few great resources to help you take the steps you need to take in your business in order to reach success and sustainability.

#5DaystoLaunch Challenge is BACK, babe! Word on the street is, you have some pretty bomb ideas but for whatever reason, you just keep them in your pocket, you sit on them, you hold onto them, and you don’t launch them. What the heck? What are you waiting for, lady? There is a valuable opportunity there that can earn you some real cash dollar bills for your business. So many of you come to us saying that you have this amazing dreamy idea, but you are frozen, you are stuck, and you are on the fence. A lot of you live in Sitting-on-the-fence-ville, right? But the reality of it all is, it is not comfortable or really beneficial for anyone.

We want to help you to get into the launch mindset and this is why we created the 5 Days to Launch Challenge to arm you with the strategies and the steps you need to get there. We have determined that launching something and launching it well really just comes down to five steps. That’s it. Five steps. And we’re here to remind you what those steps are with a repeat one of most valuable episode to-date. You can do one step a day and at the end of five days, you will have launched a product and made actual money. So, get ready to jump into your very own launch by signing up for the challenge today! No excuses.

Today on the show we welcome Brooke Genn. Brooke is a writer, a photographer, podcast host and one part of a power couple together with her husband, Wilhelm. Brooke has had a really interesting and eclectic past and today works full-time with her spouse, building a business together as well as building a tiny home on wheels. In this episode, we are talking about what it takes to be a power couple. We get into the steps Brooke and her husband took to get her husband to come home and work with her full-time and how they are able to travel the world together and do exactly what they’ve always wanted.

We find out what Brooke has learned from working with her husband and how they have navigated this transition, having their own independence what it takes to run a business when you and your partner are so emotionally tied. A lot of us have thought on and off about working with our spouses but Brooke and her husband are successfully doing it! There is a lot to be learned from this episode about business and about relationships… even if you aren’t working together.

Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast we welcome the wonderful, the magnificent, the powerhouse, Erin Kelly! Erin is here to talk to us about MemberVault, something we are more than excited about. We’ll be hearing about how MemberVault uses gamification as way to boost your business and increase your revenue. Erin will be starting from the very beginning and explaining exactly what MemberVault does and what gamification actually means, so if any of this sounds new and a little daunting, don’t worry because we have you covered!

During our discussion you’ll get everything you need to know about the great service that MemberVault provides and how you might be able to incorporate it into your strategy. By incentivizing, tracking and tagging, MemberVault enables businesses to tailor and curate their communications and offers to their audiences which are proven to increase results. Sound good? We thought so! The most exciting part of it all is how the service actually cuts down on your workload and allows many automated actions to occur.  You will be getting more interaction for less time spent, and if that isn’t the ticket, we do not know what is. So stay tuned as Erin helps us break it all down for your listening pleasure.

Today on the podcast, we welcome our latest internet crush, Chris Davis. Chris is the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign and is an email marketing genius. With everything going on in your business, the truth is, you need to take your email marketing seriously. Chris has helped us so much with kicking our email marketing strategy into high gear. He is an incredible resource, and in this episode, we get deep into discovering information about your customers, as well as some of the basic mindsets you need to be in when you’re starting your email marketing game.

Chris uses a ton of analogies to break this information down in a way that is easily digestible for newcomers and old-timers alike. We discuss how to personalize your emails, the benefit of multiple marketing platforms and get a few key tips for using the ActiveCampaign platform. If you are about to tackle your own email strategy, this episode will really help you to dive in with the right mindset. And if you already have an email marketing strategy set up and sailing, there is information in this episode that will get you to reconsider, adapt and improve it. If you are just stuck or overwhelmed, in any shape or form, about your strategies – this episode is here to help you reset that mentality, help you move forward and get your audience through the door.

Today we are welcoming you to a brand new series that we are kicking off right here, right now! The monthly series is called Boss Talk and it’s an unscripted, uncensored, roundtable, brainstorming session between Abbie, Emylee and our lovely visiting guests. We’ll be diving into hot topics in the industry right now and will kick off every episode by posing a question to each of us in the discussion, which we’ll flesh out throughout the show. Today’s question is, “What are your thoughts on the phrase "community over competition?" And here to help us answer it, is the delightful boss babe, Steph Crowder of Courage & Clarity.

Here in this series, there is no holding back, no sugar-coating, no censoring. It’s just us, cracking open beers and navigating important questions that you’re probably wondering about too… So, are you someone who is all for community, or all for competition? Or is it about striking a healthy balance between the two? But how do we do that and are authentic communities really possible? This is an important and topical debate across all industries right now and one that we’re not sure people are speaking about as honestly as openly as we’d like. This series is all about real, off-the-cuff, honest opinions and if that’s your jam, then come and join us!

Today on the show we welcome Josh Stanton. Josh is the co-founder of Screw The Nine To Five, which is his and his wife, Jill’s, slice of the internet where they help entrepreneurs bring  more attention to their brands, make more money in their business and get more out of their life through simple strategies, how to’s and behind-the-scenes glimpses into the realities of building a business online. In this episode, we tackle the topic of how to create a highly engaged Facebook group. We’re here today to let you in on a little secret and that Facebook member numbers is kind of a load of BS if you don’t have engagement! But how do you cultivate engagement, and better yet sustain it, from the get-go?

Josh lets us in on their tips, tricks and processes that have helped him and Jill create a successful, highly engaged and empowered Facebook group that actually drives members to sales. All done in as little as thirty minutes a week! We discuss how to show up for your people personally, how to drive them to your products or services, how to set group rules and expectations and how to keep your page alive and buzzing with content, questions and resources that impact the community you are serving. If you are looking to step up your Facebook game and create a thriving community – then this is the episode to fill up your notepad up with!

All right, it’s the episode you’ve all been waiting for. We are finally ready to talk about the biggest change we’ve made in TCC in a long time. We’ve moved email service providers… TWICE and we spoke about this is in our monthly review for April but promised we would break it all down into an episode all of its own. So here it is. Today we are running through the reason why we switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit, and then switched again from ConvertKit to Infusionsoft and then again from Infusionsoft to ActiveCampaign. Complexities aside, what we really want this episode to do is serve as an educational resource for you if you are needing help deciding between two platforms.

So in this episode we will be diving into why certain platforms just didn’t work, as well as the key reasons that made us sway to ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign. We walk you through various system features of the platforms, like ConvertKit’s tagging-based system versus ActiveCampaign’s automation-based system and how these worked for us. We also get into the nitty-gritty’s of how integrations, deep integrations and visual automation work in ConvertKit as well as in ActiveCampaign and how we were able to find out so much more about our customers using certain features. No matter what service provider you choose, at the end of the day you should always pick what feels right for you and your business. We hope that this episode will help you to make a more informed choice and get you a step closer to being a turbo-boss babe!

Today on the show we are doing our monthly review for April 2018. Our monthly review is a popular episode that we do every month. In the past, we have gone into a lot of depth with all of our numbers and our tracking. However, we have decided to narrow it down a little bit to be a more of an overview. If you want all the nitty-gritty’s, you can find them inside The Goal Crusher Club. In the episode, we are a little goofy because well, April was crazy! We just got back from a week-long trip to Chicago for the She Did It Her Way Summit. We did some strategizing in our hotel room (which we covered in post-it notes and crazy-lady handwriting) and will be reporting back on our plans and goals for the future. We’ll also be discussing our experience switching email providers (again) from Infusionsoft to ActiveCampaign, as well as how we got 100 members into the Goal Crusher Club through some darn fine teamwork.

In addition to that, we get into some deeper identity crises we’ve been experiencing in our business and the “Aha” moment in Chicago that reminded us that the destination is the journey. Our biggest glory moment this month has been the positive shifts we have seen in our team and how we have come to learn that teamwork takes, well, so much work. Work that is so worth it! We end off this episode with some good ol’ fashion funnel talk and our improvements to work toward for next month. We hope this episode will inspire you to keep going, even if you don’t have it all figured out yet. We sure don’t, but hey, we’re enjoying the ride. Bring it on May!

Today on the podcast we welcome Justine Nelson. Justine is a friend and previous co-worker who embarked on a personal journey to get rid of debt… and then decided to teach other people how to do it too. Justine is the founder of Debt Free Millennials, an online resource blog and coaching center helping thousands of millennials ditch debt and live like a boss. Today we are speaking about all the fun things – like student loans, debt culture and budgeting. We are also going to be discussing how to navigate conversations around debt with your partner and family and how having a budget and goals in your personal life leads to amazing things in your business life.

We hear how this Midwest millennial got into debt in the first place, how she broke out of debt's chains and was able to start a business from the ground up and do things in her life that she never even imagined. Since Justine has been in the dark pits of debt herself, she is a really great person to get some tips and advice from on how to cope with these financial practicalities, as well as the emotional strain that debt can place on your relationships. If you are feeling overwhelmed by your own debt, Justine is going to show you just how doable (and surprisingly fun) paying off your debt can be. If you want to live that debt free life and grow the business you have always dreamed of growing, then this inspirational episode is a great place to start!

Welcome to Part 4 of the Goal Crusher Club Series! Today we are talking about one of Abbie’s favorite things on the planet – creating Key Performance Indicators in your business, otherwise known as KPI’s. We will be walking you through some of the things you need to be tracking on a month to month basis that will genuinely help you realize the health and wellness of your business and exactly what you need to be paying attention to. KPI’s are going to give you all the knowledge you need about where you should be spending your time; what needs more babying and perhaps what needs to be cut. If you aren’t tracking these things you may never be able to recognize what might be an issue in your business, or which aspect of your business you need to grow. This leaves you guessing over and over again and this is not where you want to be!

Ultimately, it comes down to performance and numbers and this is where identifying your KPI’s come in! In this episode, we are going to get you tracking like you’re on safari. We’re going to be explain exactly how to track your data over a launch period and show you exactly how to calculate your earnings per lead, your cost per lead and the additional numbers you should be paying attention to. We are also going to be showing you how to analyze your monthly data; including your most popular posts and your most engaged customer and how you can use them to propel your business forward with confidence.