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! 

Today on the podcast we are joined by the fabulous Lauren Goldstein, CEO and founder of Golden Key Partnership, a strategy consulting firm that helps businesses to scale smart in order to be more sustainable. There is tons to learn from her seasoned and scientifically-backed approach, so today she will be dishing out straightforward facts, particularly as it pertains to productivity and how it relates to your profit. She shares time-wasting tactics that many of us are skilled at and pulls up some new studies that illuminate what distraction does to our day. A question we often think about is what we need to be doing to move our business forward, and it can be stressful to decide which of the dozens of things to take or leave. Lauren weighs in on the matter with some simple, no-nonsense advice. 

Being overwhelmed with tasks can lead to decision fatigue, which prevents us from effectively prioritizing tasks that are most important. Productivity and processes can make or break an entrepreneur because of burnout or be the demise of a business due to revenue and profit leaks. According to the IDC, companies lose 20 to 30% in revenue every year as a result of inefficiencies. This is a staggering statistic! Therefore, we bring you this episode that is guaranteed to help you improve your productivity, so be sure to join in the conversation! 

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!

Today we’re excited to be talking about a number of awesome productivity hacks. We know this is a popular topic many have covered, but it’s because it shapes the future of your business and in fact, your day-to-day happiness! We sometimes get stuck in a rut where we simply can’t focus and work like we are able to at other times. Now, with the changing season, we thought it would be an appropriate time to relook at some of these daily practices and share what we’ve personally done to up our level of productivity. 

In this episode, each of us will share three tips that have worked for us, including claiming your me-time, structuring your day, considering your optimal work environment and building rewards into stressful tasks. For all of this and more, don’t miss out on today’s productivity hacks episode! 

This is an episode that can apply to any of our listeners, no matter where you are currently at with your biz! There are always times that you need to get people on board and with what you are doing or hoping to do. Whether you are just starting or ramping up to a new level, conversations have to be had with those close to us, to create understanding, buy-in and a system that can work for you. You need to be able to communicate where your passion lies and how you want to do things moving forward and these can be awkward conversations at times but we are here to guide you the process and make it that little bit easier! We want to help you to see what is important, what must be said and what can be left out.

These are such necessary conversations with our friends, partners, and family and their buy can be the help that you need to get where you are going. At the same time, you do not have to rely on people being on board with us to be successful, you will have to gauge your own needs in this regard. Change, whether big or small, can be a gamble and moving in new directions often has no guarantees. We suggest a bit of planning of these types of conversations as well as some warning for the other party involved. Most people do not like big announcements sprung on them out of nowhere! We also want to mention that other people's feelings are not your problem or your choice but that does not mean they will not affect you. We want to help you make things go smoother in potentially rocky terrain, so join us as we dive in!

Ever been stuck with ideas and you just didn’t know if they were right for you or how to put them into action? We’ve been getting tons of questions from you all out there, and most of the questions being along the lines of, “How do you guys know when a product or a launch is the right thing to do?” and “When do you reassess and change things and how do you actually know that something isn’t quite right?” We’re here today to tell you about our past experiences and how we got to figuring it all out.

In our experience we’ve always just kinda “did it” and generally made it happen. There haven’t been many ideas that have come up that didn’t ultimately end up being created. We’re digging into how we originally started and how we knew it was the right choice for us.  We also delve into where our heads were at along the process and what you can do turn your vision into daily actions. From idea, to conception, to sale, we’re giving you both parts of our system. Be sure to keep listening to find out more!

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! 

Welcome back to the show everyone out there! So happy to have you and also so happy to have a great friend with us today! None other than Haley Burkhead is here to tell you all about how to make your business more profitable through automation and what she calls the scalability factor. Haley is our go to texting buddy for all things business and we are basically texting best buds at this point! We are able to help each other out so much in times of need so we hope what she has to say on the show today will help you too!

All of us want you to have that consistency that makes business work! This is what the scalability factor can do for you. It can take the parts of your biz that are challenging and the least fun and get them done; better, faster and at higher levels so you can focus on what you love to do; be creative and connect with your peeps! It is such a unique and well proven model we cannot wait for you to share in the results!

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!