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.

Today we’re going to talk about offering too many services and how to transition out of your Cheesecake Factory phase, namely, having way too many items on your menu. In a recent episode, we discussed narrowing down your services, and what it would look like to have conversations with your existing clientele about changing their service or potentially even eliminating their service altogether. Today’s episode is for those of you who are too scared to even consider this option!

Tuning in you’ll hear us tackle how to make this transition and why it doesn’t need to entail massive sacrifices. We realize that everyone has different needs and limitations. So whether you want to make your transition in twelve days or twelve months is completely up to you! In our conversation, we break down how to streamline your packages by asking yourself the right questions and what you should know about clients when creating your offers. We also talk about the immense possibilities that open up from living in your expertise, and what it means to make your life your career. If you can't even imagine reducing the number of options you have available to your clients and want to discover how to overcome your fear, then this episode is for you!

We have now done multiple callouts, promotions and launches of the Incubator. We've had hundreds of applications and we’re working with incredible clients inside the program. And if you’re not one of them, you should be! If you’re scared to start a conversation with us, you need to get rid of that feeling right now because we are really not scary at all. You can literally ask us anything, we have no boundaries when it comes to helping our clients. We’re here to help you change your business for the better, so don’t waste any more time stuck where you are!

If you’re a true crime fan and you enjoy a scandalous story about fraud, you’ve definitely spent some time thinking about people who are bigger visioning. These are people who started by looking at the end result, instead of asking themselves what they can do today. While we’re definitely not advocating for crime, we totally believe that there’s great benefit to be had when you consider the big picture of your business! Legacy planning doesn’t mean you’re not invested in your business today; it just means you’re building with the future in mind, and that can only benefit you, both today AND in the long term.

We’ve seen people invest so much into their business only to realize that the success of their business rests solely on their ability to keep it afloat. Creating systems, training staff, and starting with the end in mind are all powerful tools to help your business to thrive even once you have made your exit. We’re in the business of helping you to make the changes you need to make to create a sustainable business plan that will enable you to thrive today, and to continue to flourish after you eventually leave! So, tune in today to find out more about creating a retirement plan for your business!

As owners and CEOs, we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but we’ve also learned a lot from them. In today’s episode, we discuss some of the mistakes we’ve made, as well as the errors we’ve seen TONS of CEOs make over the years. So, if you recognize any of these in yourself, don’t worry, you’re in good company! Tuning in, you’ll hear us break down the 7 most prominent red flags and toxic behaviors that continue to happen in business. Learn how to recognize them, why they happen, and the tiny course corrections you can make to solve them.

The things that we are pointing out today are based on specific lessons we’ve observed throughout our careers. We’ve seen these errors play out in various ways, from friends who have needed to course-correct, to mistakes that we have inadvertently made in our own business. We’re taking this as an opportunity to share our knowledge so that you can become aware of these potential pitfalls and hopefully skip them altogether!

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you might be under the impression that the hosts get along just fine. You’re right! When there are just two people, conflict is a lot less complicated, and a lot easier to resolve. Around two weeks into having a bigger team, we noticed that everyone would look to us for the answers, never contesting our conclusions. Different perspectives, backgrounds and insights all help us to make better decisions as a company. Abagail and Emylee want to make it really clear that not only do they not want to make all the decisions, but they actually believe that would be a really bad idea! That’s where conflict is necessary for the business to grow and thrive.

There’s never a good time to make radical changes and you can always find a reason not to do something. But we’ve learned from experience that there is so much to be gained from pursuing opportunities, even under adverse circumstances. One of the things that inhibit us from pursuing growth and opportunities is the feeling that we wouldn’t be able to cope with these new changes in a healthy and sustainable way. We often feel this because we compare ourselves to others. But the truth is that you can never know the full story of someone’s success. You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes or how their life really looks.

One of the biggest things we’ve learned from building our business is the importance of a supportive team and designing a business that is flexible enough to accommodate you during the different seasons of your life. We discuss some of the difficult circumstances we’ve been in while building our business and how it motivated us to build a business that could adapt to our needs. We also share our advice and insights on how to change your mindset and start pursuing radical change. So make sure you tune in to hear how we’ve adapted to our circumstances and how we’re helping others do the same!

We may be divided in how aware we currently feel in terms of how we’re spending our time, but one thing we can agree on is that we need to be mindful of it! So many mentors over the years have questioned how we’re utilizing our time and, for as many years, it wasn’t being used as effectively as it could be! As service-based business owners, many of us tend to wear too many hats, which prevents us from focusing on what we do best. We’ve personally been through a really unique season where we've been hiring a lot and we have more help than we’ve ever had! This has allowed for more time to rethink how we’re spending the time we do have, instead of simply filling it with the necessary tasks to keep charging on.

Does that mean we’re working any less? Absolutely not. This is not a slow season by any means, but we have been able to dig into a time where we can be really intentional. In this episode, we discuss the importance of protecting your hours and being intentional with your time, the value of visioning, and the seven most common mistakes we see service-based business owners making. Tune in to find out what needs to shift in order for you to unlock future growth and move towards a life-first business!

There’s something in the air at the moment; so many people are questioning themselves and their businesses, and there are a whole lot of very valid reasons for this (we are in the midst of a pandemic and heading towards a potential World War, after all). A lot of service providers have, as a result of these feelings of uncertainty and overwhelm, considered pivoting their business by adding different streams of revenue, changing their offerings, and so on. For anyone who is entertaining alternative ideas, we understand the allure, but we want to bring you back to reality and share with you what you should be doing during these challenging times instead!

Many people ignore the things that can really move the needle in their businesses because they often seem deceptively simple. We want to help you understand these simple ‘levers’ and use them correctly, because we can guarantee that they will improve your business in more ways than one! In this episode, we let you guys in on the not-so-secret levers that will allow you to continue to prosper and create more profit in your business. Hitting ceilings of time and money are an inevitable part of running a business, but your ability to adjust the levers that talk about today is a superpower that you will always have.

Tuning in today, you’ll find out how to decide which of the two levers you need to pull next in order to increase profits or get more of your time back, how to start with a life-first mentality when shaping your offers and price, and the self-reflection questions you can ask yourself when you've hit an income and capacity ceiling, plus so much more!

The interesting thing about any mistake is that it’s not always detrimental when you do it at the beginning, but holding onto it can sometimes prevent you from future success! At a recent conference we spoke at, we were asked about some of the biggest mistakes we have made in our business; and one of the things we highlighted was structuring our business according to task-based activities, rather than bringing in a team of permanent employees with outcome-based deliverables.

Something we feel is getting a little bit confused in the realm of being a service provider consultant, learning from other people, hiring contractors, having employees, and serving clients, is the question of how we serve said clients, how we learn, and how we get work done in our own business. The conversation around working one-on-one with people, using done-for-you services, and learning in different aspects by buying books, hiring a coach, or being in a group coaching program, all start to get a little muddy when we’re also service providers in that very business.

We want to clear this up and provide some perspectives and clarification on the buckets we see us providing, our clients providing, our clients hiring for, and really how things can be structured to have purpose within these different containers. Today, specifically, we’re talking about what the heck group coaching is and when it’s actually beneficial, versus one-on-one coaching and done-for-you services, both as a provider and the consumer.

If you follow us on social media you may be aware that we have just announced our first virtual conference! While the conference will no doubt share some similarities with our online summits, we anticipate that previous attendees will be shocked by how incredibly different this experience truly is. One of the developments that we are most excited about is the fact the entire event will be live, giving us the scope to connect with attendees in real-time! We are also deeply aware that our participants are incredibly busy which is why we’re so proud that the entire conference will take place over the course of one day within four sessions!

This is the second hottest take of a conversation we’ve ever had publicly! We are so passionate about this topic, and we really want to pass on this valuable information to you because we deeply care about you and your team! When the mistakes that we are going to talk about today are made, we know that it’s coming from the best of places, but because the future of your company is at stake, and because we care about that, we really hope you’re going to listen to this episode!

The fact of the matter is that you are most likely drastically overpaying your staff. We so often see owners hardly taking a salary for themselves, but then paying their staff six figure salaries. We also see people hiring super cheap labor. There is so much wrong with both of these phenomenons, but the good news is that there is another option!

Today we are going to be sharing some thoughts and some hot takes about hiring! There are so many people out there saying all sorts of things that make our insides squirm, and we don’t want you to waste your time and effort on strategies that definitely do not work. We also got sucked into the sexiness of the idea of hiring duplicates of ourselves, so we speak from firsthand experience when we tell you that this is a BIG mistake!

When people get to the point where they know they need to bring on someone else, it’s usually because of one of two main reasons; either that they need to hire for a very specific role for their company, or they’re burning the candle at both ends and therefore if they hire “another me” they’ll be able to get twice as much work done, but if you keep listening you’ll understand why you should never hire another you!