Today we’re sharing with you our profit report for September. This is such a great opportunity for us to reflect on our business while also giving you a sneak-peek into how this might be applicable to yours. And before you think this is going to be boring – it’s not a traditional income report and we’re not giving you every single figure because it leads to a lot of unnecessary comparisons, disrupting the possibility of learning something. 

In this episode, we’re going to go over what worked and what didn’t, where the money came from and how it left, and what profit was left right at the end. Comparing September’s report with the previous month’s will also be helpful in understanding the unpredictable nature of business and will be a good starting point for getting some new strategies in place.

Welcome to the Strategy Hour, everybody! Today's show is all about our upcoming summit! Yup, it is our fourth summit, can you believe it? This time we are focused on helping you make the most of the end of the year and soaring into the new year like a rockstar! It is going to be so awesome and we can hardly contain our excitement about it! There is so much potential for the last part of the year and we probably do not need to tell you that Q4 is a really big one for small business owners. 

Our summit is going to set you up to tie a big, beautiful bow around 2019 and kickstart the new year on the right foot with the best energy. It can also be used as a great way to take stock and move into the next phase based on the lessons available. We wanted to bring you a complete package that offers a selection of things you need for now, the end of the year and the new year too! These time-sensitive strategies and ideas will cover Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the holiday season, planning, questions and setting goals. We want to help you commit to the right things and give you the right stuff to implement in your business for the better. Join us as we give a preview of what to expect!

Today we are super glad to welcome business and NLP coach Jen Casey to the show! Hailing from NYC, Jen is focused on helping coaches sell profitable group programs by incorporating psychology into their sales techniques. She also has her own podcast called the Inner Boss Podcast, so make sure to check that out! As you probably know, here at The Strategy Hour we are pretty obsessed with psychology! Jen is all about perfecting sales language for webinars and in-person meetings and uses her techniques to change deep-rooted beliefs and alter the neural pathways that hold us back. 

She has action steps for repeating patterns that create new pathways and habits that are more in line with our goals and ambitions and by learning these ideas you can help your customers do the same thing! This is a long episode with lots to think about, so you might want to grab a notepad to take part in the exercises! Make sure to share your experiences on our Instagram, we love hearing from you!

Today on the podcast we have Braden Drake, a California licensed attorney with a master’s degree in tax law, joining our conversation. He runs an education company that teaches other small business owners how to get the legal and tax stuff in order to ultimately unf*ck your business framework! He’s a pro at sorting out all the accounting and tax mess we make in our businesses, all those things that are totally befuddling to most of us! 

You’ll be happy to hear that he dishes out a lot of great strategy regarding lawyer-y things, and towards the end of our talk, he also gives away an awesome resource. If you need to do some damage control or brush up on your know-how around the sticky issues like choosing the right entity, paying quarterly taxes and avoiding Frankenstein contracts, be sure to tune in! 

We’ve heard from a lot of people that going from contractors to employees is complicated, expensive and overwhelming, so for a long time, we avoided going down that road. But then we started looking into it and considered all the potentially good stuff about having employees, such as having more control over how they spend their time and when they work. On today’s episode, we want to talk about all the things to think about before hiring an employee, because the truth is, it is very different and a much bigger responsibility. 

There are pros and cons to both, though, and that is why we share with you our experience over the last few years, so that you can be prepared for whichever scenario you choose. It’s all about looking at your business and figuring out whether you are in a financial position to take on a full time employee and whether you are prepared to deal with the positives and negatives of each option. Join us for everything you need to know about the people who do work for your business! 

Income reports can be super distracting and set you on a road of comparison, so instead of focusing on the exact dollars, it might be more useful to look at the profit and give you a breakdown of the biggest sources of income as well as the major expenses. Therefore, we are calling it a profit report and we want to ask all of you, even before we start, to DM us feedback – whether this format worked and helped you in your business. 

In this episode, you will hear more about our thought processes around profits and expenses, but it is important to keep in mind that there are many different ways in which to approach this, so we are not suggesting that you replicate exactly what we do. For the sake of transparency, we also want to let all of you in instead of just talking about the topic. We believe sharing the truth about our business will be of much greater value to you than simply giving you a blueprint for what it should look like. The focus should be profit and figuring out what your goal is in this regard is more important than being able to say you are a six-figure business. We’re baring it all today, so don’t miss out! 

Welcome back to the show, everybody! Today we are going to be letting you even further into our business lives! As we continue to grow we are constantly asking ourselves, "What is the content that people want to hear about?" This goal of keeping you entertained, educated, and engaged is very important to us and we have always loved sharing our lives and work with all of you. When we started out, everything we did was fun, fresh, and engaging and it was easy to share this with our listeners in a natural way. As we have grown, things have changed and we have been more considerate in our choices but we want to carry on sharing stuff with you that is exciting, new, and informative. It has always been our best thing, being able to share something about a problem we solved or a strategy we discovered. 

As we enter year four of our biz we have to continue to look for these opportunities when we have had a different reality from where started out and many of our listeners. We want to help you now and set you up for success in the future! We have a feeling there may be some inaccurate perceptions out there of what is happening in our business. You are welcome to DM us on Instagram with your thoughts but we sense people find us less relatable than when we started out and were smaller. There have been challenges in continually connecting with our audience as our situation has changed, our team has grown and so on, but we want, more than anything, to stay relatable to all of you! We actually think we are probably in more similar situations to a lot of you than you may think! All this to say, we have resolved to let you in on some of this and share more of what is going on in our current lives than we have been!

Would you ever consider deleting your Instagram account if you had nearly 40,000 followers? Businesses go through different seasons and for a long time we had not focused on Instagram because we were otherwise occupied. But for some reason, our account remained semi-active and we were still slowly but surely gaining followers, even though we only really posted about the podcast and random bits in between. But the engagement was poor, so much so that we no longer saw the need to post at all or to have the account, and this set us on a rollercoaster of a journey of trying to figure out whether we should delete our existing account and start all over again. This might sound crazy, but we had what we believed were legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, and our intentions were so good! 

We were absolutely convinced that this was the way to go, that is, until a comment or two from our audience and friends threw a wrench in the works and forced us back to square one. This was an amazing educational process that we came though as we learned a ton about ourselves, our business and what our approach to our followers should be. If you are thinking about deleting your account and starting off with a clean slate or just looking to grow your Instagram engagement, this episode is perfect for you, so be sure to listen in! 

Today we talk about a fascinating topic, one that affects every single one of you in one way or another in your business. When we think about marketing, we tend to think about psychology in general and the things that inherently appeal to all people. But, there is a better way to approach marketing and it pertains to the different generations. Ever thought about why people of different ages think and behave so differently from one another and often bump heads, whether in families or in business? What we discuss today will shed a whole lot of light on this subject. We compare and contrast the generations, from the traditionalists up to Gen Z and everything in between. 

Each new generation is constructed in a unique way with different things that impact how they view the world and what kinds of consumers they are. For this reason, marketing efforts should be adjusted accordingly to ensure that you speak to the needs of the generation you are targeting, and so you can better understand why certain initiatives will be more effective than others. We have relied heavily on the research of the amazing Jason Dorsey for this episode, so a lot of the information provided here is from his work on the topic. Definitely check out his website if you want to find out more. Jason also speaks about a very interesting new thought about millennials, one which we will get into on this episode, so be sure to tune in! 

We’ve previously done an episode about what you need to consider before starting a podcast, and we admit that it was a bit of a Debbie Downer, so today we want to do a follow up of that where we go over some of the things we’ve learned in the meantime. We talk about the reasons for starting a podcast and about everything you should have set up before you can start, including deciding on the extent to which you will be involved and the equipment you will need to record and where to find it. 

On a more serious note, we talk about the profitability of podcasting and what you can expect to get out of it as well as different ways you might think of monetizing it. We then switch to chatting about bringing guests on the show and finding fun topics and conclude with our number one tip for getting your show noticed and sponsored, so be sure to join in on the conversation! 

Guess what’s back? Another Boss Project Summit! For those who have not yet joined us for one of these events, it’s basically an amazing, free business conference during which you can wear your PJs while attending in the comfort of your own home. We gather all the best entrepreneurs and business owners to teach you everything they know, from starting an online business to pivoting and scaling, and everything in between. Head to the Boss Project Summit website to sign up and get your virtual ticket. It is happening live August 20-22, 2019, so make a note of that. 

On this episode we give you a quick overview of some of the topics that will be covered and the great sponsors we have for the summit. We also tell you how you should go about getting access to the summit and what an all access pass will allow you to do. So be sure to get with the Boss Project Summit program! 

As your business grows, you might find the need to hire a virtual assistant. How we approach hiring now is very different from what it used to be and getting someone who is the right fit takes a good portion of know-how. It’s a learning curve and a process for sure. The first step is to make sure that you actually need a person and that a well-functioning system or software application is not able to address the need, because that will naturally work out way cheaper! 

When you’ve done your research and figured out that you absolutely do need a human to do the task, you might begin by asking for referrals. But how will you know if this is the right person for the job? Well, on this episode we share some of the greatest advice for hiring a virtual assistant – tips and tricks that you can apply to really any position you need to be filled. So be sure to tune for today’s Strategy Hour Podcast! 

Today we are carrying on with listener questions, so do not forget to send yours in if you have any! You can do this on Instagram or in the Facebook Group, we love to hear your ideas and questions, so go ahead and ask away! Today we are tackling a question on how to keep communication clear, deal fairly with different amounts of input and how to keep a partnership strong and working well. We have talked about this a little before in other episodes, in different contexts, we have looked at the legal side, how we started out, how things have changed, our thoughts on partnership and breaking down our team. But it is high time for an update, so here we go!

Truth be told, we do not really suggest you go out looking for a partnership like ours. We have seen again and again how difficult it can be and how businesses dissolve, we have just been very lucky in the way that we fit together. So this is us sharing our lessons that you can apply to your team in whatever shape or form it is in now or takes in the future. We are sharing some strategies that have worked for us in resolving conflict and sharing the roles of a business and truthfully, it has mostly been really smooth and easy for us, but that is not always the case. So join us as we break down some tools, books, software and ideas that can make it work that much better for you!

Today we are talking about a real hot topic and something we should all be talking about more often! We will be unpacking inclusivity and diversity and our own experiences and the lessons we have learned in this area. We will be drawing mostly from our recent summit and what we took away from the event that we will carry forward. This episode will have actionable strategies and tips about how to invite everyone to your table. We have spoken on this topic in various ways on the podcast before but it definitely deserves a dedicated episode, so we will be discussing community over competition, inclusion in our own company, the speakers we invited to the summit and what to do when something rubs you the wrong way. 

We all have a responsibility to open up these conversations if we are going to make any progress as a society. Do not worry, you are not alone if the discomfort itself makes you feel uncomfortable! There is a lot of work to do and processing all of this is not always easy but you learn best by doing and mistakes are okay! It is a big misconception that we will all get it right every time, so do not put too much pressure on yourself in that regard, rather commit to learning, listening and trying your best to contribute to important change!

Welcome back to the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today’s episode is mostly for the listeners out there whose businesses are under the $500k a year earning mark but who have this possibility on the horizon. We want to talk to you about the growth that happens around this point and for you to ask yourself whether you really need to keep growing. The reason this is an important question is because as you scale past $500k you actually may not increase your profits.

This law of diminishing returns is something we have experienced at Boss Projects as we grew. What does it really mean to have a seven figure business? The answer might not be quite what you expect. In order to get you ready for these possibilities we will be talking accounting and the different ways that making money works in your business. So if you are ready to start making your revenue work for you and to keep your profits up, listen in, we cover it all!