Our whole mission is to help you transform your passion into a full-time business that provides you with a sustainable income, while also giving you the freedom to make your own rules. But becoming a creative entrepreneur comes with its own obstacles, and today we talk about the three-level model that we use to help our audience better understand business and where they are at in the process. The first tier of the model has you stuck in the idea phase, which often involves redesigning your brand, changing your website and trying to get all the cosmetic aspects perfect. The problem is, however, that you never move on to the implementation stage. 

When you are on the second level, you have started implementing your ideas and have made a few sales, but here you might also get trapped. There is a temptation to try several ideas at once and you come up with many tools and programs to help you grow. But the truth is, if you want to get to that third level, you need to simplify by choosing to focus on only one or two things, and then to carefully measure their results. Remember to sign up for our upcoming webinar where you’ll learn a whole lot more, including our business philosophy, the most common mistakes creative entrepreneurs are making and how to get past yourself! 

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.

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!

If you have not already heard of the law of diminishing returns, it states that everything we do is on a bell curve and as we do more work so the results improve. But once we pass a certain point or amount of work, the results begin to lessen and the work we do becomes less effective. After a certain amount of time and effort, our results can even start to decline and drop off to a point below our earlier work! The main lesson we want to extrapolate here is that more work equals better results up to a certain point.

As we work on projects, we have to find these points and understand how far our effort is going. We have to be able to apply this theory to our business otherwise we run the risk of shooting ourselves in the foot through overwork and time-wasting. We need to focus on productivity, how to spend our time wisely and when we are done with a specific task. Learning the answer to this question might take time but we can start to notice patterns if we are sensitive to this dynamic. This law will apply to physical as well as digital work and remember that your creativity and energy is subjective, we never really know for sure, but we can work on our mindset and perspective to minimize these negative effects.

Welcome back to another episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today, we dive into the topic of owning and changing your deeply rooted beliefs. Imagine you are a tree and you have an abundance of beautiful fruit hanging from you, but you also have fruit that is rotten, that you feel ashamed of and that you don’t want others to see. The only way to determine what the problem is, why there is this bad fruit, is to go through the entire system to see where the change needs to happen.

On this episode, we talk about behavior, values, and beliefs using the metaphor of a tree – a helpful way to better understand ourselves and others. How do you bring about change in your life, where do you begin? We talk about where our values come from and how we can begin to not only change ourselves but our entire communities. Regardless of how ingrained you think your behavior is, we all have the ability to grow and improve and to even do a complete 180! This episode brings you inspirational stories and lots of practical advice for business, raising kids, and life in general, so be sure to tune in! 

Today on the show we are giving you a little break from the norm and offering a few updates on things besides Boss Project. That's right, this episode is dedicated to all those things outside of work, although some of it is more work! We both have a lot going on behind the scenes, in our personal lives and we wanted to share some of what keeps us inspired, busy and our occupied when we are not doing our main thing! 

This conversation includes a lot of life changes because that is what has been going on for both of us, personally. Hopefully, you will find it insightful, useful and show you just a little bit more of our world. We sure do love sharing it all with you, so let's go ahead and dive right in!

Today on the podcast we have a Boss Talk about a topic that’s been on our minds a lot lately, probably because we’ve been going through all these transitions. So today we discuss what failure is to each of us and how it makes us feel. We felt that it was really important to open up this conversation because there’s a lot of shame that can come with failure, and that makes us not want to talk about it! But sharing ideas around this topic will hopefully build even stronger support in our community as it is something that all of us have gone through at some point in our lives. 

As cliché as it sounds, failure is always an opportunity to learn – even though this is not what we want to hear when it happens to us. It’s true though, failure gives us another opportunity to try again and brings us one step closer to that thing that we’re supposed to be doing and that feels good! Don’t miss out on this episode and join in the conversation by sending us a DM on Instagram! 

As you know, all of our lives are ever evolving and the schedules and routines that organize our days are constantly in motion. A big part of this, for us, is obviously our business and we have learned some big lessons about riding the waves of change so that everything doesn't go terribly wrong any time something comes up. Today we will be talking about two major curveballs that life has thrown at us, one at Emily in the form of childcare and one at Abagail in the form of her husband's uncertain career. 

In the episode we will be unpacking these stories and sharing the silver linings of each for your listening pleasure! The biggest takeaway that we want to share with all of you from this topic is that the choices you make as life changes must be the right ones for you and for your family. Not for others' standards or by their advice or opinions. Do not let the norms of society manipulate how you live your life! We are sharing all of this to support you and remind you that the right way is your way and with enough thought and time you will find it! With all that said, let's get into some strategy!

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!