Today we have our friend and ultimate boss babe, or should we say, legal babe, Christina Scalera on the show. We are super excited to get into this episode with you guys because today we are going to be chatting about something us creatives (honestly) don’t always think about. Now you’re wondering what that is, right?

Well, Christina helps creative entrepreneurs and wedding professionals make lots of money doing what they love. She is also out to cause a Ruckus™ in the legal world with legal marketing that doesn't suck. Today she is here to help us, creatives, make sure that we are protected and making smart and safe decisions online, especially in the world of collaboration.

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!

Holy moly guacamole! It’s episode 100! On today’s milestone episode, we have one of the most integral behind-the-scenes members on The Strategy Hour: Nicholette von Reiche. You might not hear her (or see her), but Nicholette is always buzzing around in the background as our business manager, graphics guru and tech ninja. Today, we’re talking all about growing a team, the state of TCC, what’s coming up for the podcast and all about the future of the biz.

We want to break down the TCC journey and let you know who has a role in the business. We can lift the curtain a bit to show you that it isn’t just us in here – but that it was just us for a long time! We have laid a lot of foundations over the course of our first business year and if you are currently laying the foundations in your own business, hopefully this will give you a glimpse into your future. We’re so excited about our first 100 episodes and we can’t wait to do a hundred more! Send the champagne, people! And let’s get into some strategy.

Lately, we have gotten some questions from our students, audience members and community about how we have evolved in our course creation journey, and so we decided to take you back. Not all the way back, not necessarily to our client days, but at least from the beginning stages of creating our first course all the way through to today. We’ll tell you what has changed and how we have been able to grow and better serve our community.

The purpose behind doing this is to really showcase to you all that you can start small (we did).  Nothing has to be perfect, just run with something and run the heck out of it until you add on something else. Dive into this episode if courses are something you’re interested in trying and learn from our mistakes. Keep listening so you can take some of our advice and see some bomb-ass results a year into it applying it.

They call her The Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon, and yes, we have her on the show today. Tracey Osborne, CEO of Empowered Fempreneurs, is here! Tracey has had a decade-long career as a Virtual Assistant and grew her business from $15,000 to 6-figures in only two years. During that time she has authored and co-authored three books, her latest being, Becoming A VA.

Inside this episode, we go over the exact systems that Tracey used to get her business off the ground, from the very beginning. We look at how she was able to leave her full-time job in 60 days, start her VA business and get off to the races in no time. We also talk about how Tracey was able to build relationships and eventually build an agency model where she brought on other VA’s inside her own business so she could grow and scale. Keep listening to learn more.

When people think of hiring, they often think that it is a complicated, convoluted, crazy process. But the truth is, it really doesn’t have to be. On today’s show, we break down the logistics of hiring into five basic action steps. First, by recognizing the gap in your business. Second, by putting your feelers out into the hiring marker. Then third, once you’ve got your list, narrowing it down to a promising employee selection. Next, negotiating pricing and then finally, locking it down with a contract. See, not too complicated, right?

Today we’re going to give you the inside scoop into how we do this in our own business as well as give you the resources to enable you to free up some time, protect yourself and your employees and get everyone on the same page and #winning! Whether you’re an employer looking to hire or an employee looking to be hired, take a listen for some tips for a more empowering experience.

On today’s show we literally take you behind the scenes of the biggest launch of our careers! After two years of hard work and thinking about what we could offer the world that’s really going to change the landscape for creative entrepreneurs, we launched The Strategy Academy. We don’t think you guys realize the amount of excitement that we have to bring you this episode. Not only are we excited because it means the launch is over and we can finally breathe, but we are also excited because it’s the biggest launch of our careers, ever! It also meant a lot of lessons learned, a lot of successful decisions, a few minor tweaks and pivots, and some crazy data and stats that absolutely blew our minds!

A lot of people plateau because they don’t know how to automate and they don’t know how to grow a team. So we took everything a step further in the Strategy Academy and really gave people like a full blown roadmap! The launch took off in June this year and had some unexpected highs, some surprising lows and some exciting turns! Today, we are giving you the launch breakdown 101. The data, the results and the digits — because y’all know we hold nothing back — of our most recent $94,936 Strategy Academy launch. Hear how we did it and how you can do it too!

You guys, today is kind of an incredible day. We are introducing you to our newest creation, The Strategy Academy. It’s our digital baby, the thing that we have been working on literally from day one. We wanted to create this new movement and program and opportunity for small business owners, specifically creative small business owners. The reactions have been amazing, the support, the cheerleading, everything around this program has just made our hearts go super warm and fuzzy.

Today, we’re going to introduce you to the Strategy Academy, we’re going to walk you through what’s inside, why it’s amazing and kind of explain more of the choose your own adventure that we have built inside this program. This will help make those decisions a little easier and really give you some guidance as to what you’re going to get out of the program and why we invested so much time and energy into it.

Well, ya’ll know by now that we are pretty much transparent about everything we learn in our business. We immediately take it and we turn around and teach it because we don’t like to hold back. We are over-sharers by nature. You get the good, bad, and the ugly with us and that’s what we are doing today; over-sharing again. Today, we wanted to dive in deeper about the business roadblocks that we have faced.

At the beginning, we consumed a lot of content from people who we knew and who we trusted, and who we saw were doing big things. One of the important pieces that not everyone talks about are the mistakes that they have made in their business and what held them back and prevented them from making more money, faster. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are just human and we make mistakes like everybody else and the thing is, if we could do anything, we want to help you avoid them or at least make them less bumpy, less crazy, less long and drawn out, and help you find the solution quickly. So let’s jump in and get started!

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 so we have 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. 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!

Today on the podcast, we have Amy Northard CPA, accountant for creatives. Amy has been a friend of ours for what feels like centuries at this point, and we have known her longer than we have known each other. She is awesome and makes everything sound so simple that you think maybe you could do it yourself, even though you can’t. Amy is so knowledgeable about all things taxes, bookkeeping, making things stress free, and making things easy to understand.

You are going to learn a lot in today’s episode, like what type of business you should be and how to even form it. She also shares her favorite apps, tools, and softwares to keep track of all your numbers. We go over the questions you should ask before you are ready to hire a CPA, things that you guys are forgetting to deduct, and stuff that you actually cannot deduct, that you might have thought you could. We also talk about the icky quarterly taxes and how to make that process super simple for you moving forward so that you are not scared and stressed out come tax season. So just relax, settle in, and give this one a listen.

Today on the podcast, we have our good friend Steph Crowder from Courage and Clarity
Podcast and Fizzle. If you have not yet seen Fizzle and its amazing membership platform full of
incredible courses for small business owners, you guys should definitely check it out. Steph is
one of our podcasting buddy friends. We meet with Steph and a couple of other ladies, twice a
month and chat all things podcasting, growth tactics, marketing, guest ideas, and all that good
stuff in our podcasting mastermind. She is an incredible human being, and we love her to
pieces. Steph is super knowledgeable, super kind, and we can’t wait for you to learn from her
today.
 

Inside this episode, Steph is giving you a step by step of all the things you need to do to
interview potential customers in order to validate your kick ass business idea. We are also
getting a behind the scenes look of a thriving membership site, and Steph is talking all about
creating amazing customer service in your business and the step-by-step creation process of
creating courses inside of Fizzle. It’s a great episode, we get really in depth especially on that
membership piece and the business idea piece, so we are really excited for you to dive in and
take away some awesome knowledge bombs from Steph.

Inside today’s episode, we are talking all about launching and specifically a launch we just had where we made $37,000 in a matter of a week. We’re going to talk to you all about what changed, what we did differently, some systems we added on to try our new take on Facebook ads, and exactly how we got the results we did. We’re even going to dive into some data and what worked and what didn’t.

We have been waiting to do this episode because we wanted to come back with all the final results and it would be helpful for you guys to know perhaps how we launched before so you can really see the value of the changes that we have made and how we approached it differently this time around. Really, it comes down to two things that we changed, so stay tuned as we dive into the details in this episode.

Today, we are super excited to bring our friend Danielle Liss to the show. She is a partner over at Hashtag-Legal and she focuses on legal issues for online business owners. Danielle has extensive experience negotiating contracts and interpreting FTC guidelines, and her experience has given her intimate knowledge of the challenges facing influencer networks and social media professionals today.

In this episode we talk all about business formation, contracts, website policies, intellectual property, copyrights, trademarks, and she may even give us the straight talk about some of the things we have not yet done inside our own business. So, regardless of where you are in your business; whether you’re  just getting started or already have your own multiple six figure business, get ready, because we promise you that you are going to learn something today!

Today on the podcast, we have Parker Stevenson of Evolved finance. We are like super pumped for you to hear from him because he’s actually one of our few male team members. Parker and his business partner, Corey, not only do the books for other online entrepreneurs, but they also coach businesses along the way. We were super excited to start working together in the new year — we had lots of things going on at the time, so it was the perfect moment to get them on board.

In this episode, you are going to learn a lot! Parker shares his opinion on small businesses DIY’ing their books, if you should do that, how you should do that, and what in the French toast “your books” even means. We go over trends that he has seen in the online business entrepreneurial world, his best tips for getting your finances organized, and he even goes through and talks to us about what the heck a profit and loss statement is and how that might be the next best thing since sliced bread when it comes to your business. We know you guys are going to love this episode, so we can’t wait for you to give this one a listen.