It’s official, we’re here for another profit report and it is June 2021! Well, technically it is no longer June but we are just backing up and talking about June, okay? Give us a second to get our accounting together so we can properly tell you about the month! We share these profit reports to give you an inside peek behind the curtain at the thinking, the processes, the strategies, and the decisions made in our business.

We know you guys are nosey. We are nosey. We would love to hear more episodes like this from even more people but this is an opportunity for us to share with you the reasoning behind some of the choices that were made in our company, some strategies that you can implement in yours, based on what we learned and what we did, and it is just honestly a place for us to recap June with you guys!

When we say that today’s episode is going to rock your world, we’re not even joking! If you have a client-based business and use Dubsado, maybe you have wanted to set up workflows, but been so overwhelmed that you haven’t started, then stop what you're doing and listen to this show with a notebook because Krystal Clark literally breaks down every step! From lead capture to onboarding to delivering to offboarding, she leaves no stone unturned. Krystal even goes so far as to give us five hacks on how she’s using Dubsado differently than what we have heard before!

One of the things that we see creative entrepreneurs doing consistently is assuming that they know what their potential client or customer thinks about the value of what they offer. These kinds of assumptions ultimately leave you with a very messy blueprint for overcoming your own limiting beliefs and appropriately pricing your digital products and services. Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast, we want to address what really makes up the value of what you offer and how your potential clients or customers see what you offer because, believe it or not, they are not one and the same thing!

Welcome to our 550th episode! We are moving into a season of growth and, with that, there are some big things we have had to start doing and thinking about, both when it comes to staffing, projects, and programs and how we want to set our business up for success in the long term. May was a month of new faces as we brought our social media in-house, which necessitated hiring for a number of new and important roles. This has been an interesting lesson for Abagail and Emylee in finding a happy balance between delegating and ensuring their vision is communicated, resulting in new routines, rhythms, and collaborative efforts.

In today’s episode, we share not only the five new hires we made and how we're growing, but also our product performance and how our expenses impacted our profit, plus so many sneak peeks that it's going to ABSOLUTELY BLOW YOUR MIND! Make sure not to miss this jam-packed Profit Report for May 2021!

Today on the podcast, please join us in welcoming Megan Hale. Megan is a Profit First® certified business strategist and money mentor for freedom-driven entrepreneurs who are ready to step into #feelgoodmoney and create sustainable, aligned business growth. With a special emphasis on empowering women-identifying entrepreneurs into their next level of growth, she regularly podcasts on the intersections of business, money, psychology, and leadership with a focus on leveraging entrepreneurship to build a more equitable world.

Speaking of making the world a better place, this episode is all about giving back! Listen in as Megan outlines how to build giving into your future, and not only how you can integrate it into your business but how to do it sustainably too. During the course of this conversation, you’ll find out how you can grow your business through giving back, if that is in alignment with your business goals, of course. Megan breaks down what a sustainable percentage is, how you can logistically set that up within your finances, and how to find causes to give to, as well as her suggestions for some important questions to ask yourself along the way.

For everything you’ve ever wanted to know about having an even bigger impact within your business and giving back, make sure not to miss this thoughtful and inspiring episode!

people are wondering what they need to do to step up their business so their partner can leave their job. We love this question because it feels like a big scary goal for a lot of people, but if it is not voiced by both people in the relationship, it does not get worked on as much. Emylee said to Abagail that she wants to talk about how Abagail’s husband managed to leave his job two years before COVID. What kinds of things did they do leading up to that, and now that they are in phase two of having him home, how does it look different? If you are a business owner and this suggestion has been brought to you by your partner, what guidance can we give you, in your business?

Today on the show we are joined by the wonderful and inspiring Kathleen Cutler! Kathleen has worked behind the scenes on multiple million dollar online stores with her main area of focus being jewelers. She has coached over a hundred different jewelers to help them achieve their business goals and get their products selling online, but Kathleen’s expertise extends so much further than just jewelry! She wants to help everyone selling products or even services online to extend the experience of the customer and drive sales through the type connections that you would usually associate with a physical retail space.

Welcome to another Profit Report episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today, we’re talking about April 2021 and, needless to say, some money got spent, some money got made. We didn’t launch anything new in April, so this report makes a direct correlation with the fact that we have tried to build a profitable and sustainable business that brings in income, regardless of whether or not we are launching something new every month. We were still, however, working on some big projects, so we were certainly knee-deep behind the scenes! Sometimes, when that happens, we will see a dip in profitability, not necessarily in revenue, and that was the case for us in April. In this episode, we share some of the projects we have been working on, such as some exciting shop website updates and a very niche copywriting assignment, and we also discuss the benefits of choosing when not to invest, especially when it comes at the cost of truly trusting yourself!

Tuning in, you’ll hear about some of the lessons we have learned over the past month, the past year, and the past 18 to 24 months, including the value of exposing yourself to other cultures, perspectives, ideas, and even industries. We also reflect on some of the mistakes we have made in order to help you avoid making the same mistakes in the future, so make sure not to miss this episode!

Today on the show, we are excited to welcome Abbey Ashley, Founder of The Virtual Savvy. Abbey has helped aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. She started her own virtual assistant business as a new mom and was able to double her salary from her full-time corporate job in just 30 days! She has since gone on to grow a seven-figure business with 19 employees and certainly has some key insights to share about how to hire to scale. It's now her passion to help others start their own VA businesses so they too can taste the freedom and flexibility of entrepreneurship.

She is currently building a brand new platform, which you will hear about towards the end of the interview, that is going to make hiring so much easier, especially for creative entrepreneurs, connecting you with virtual assistants that are going to stick around and be the right fit for you and your company. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the hiring process, particularly how to hire for a culture fit over a skill fit. We think that that is one of the most remarkable things that Abbey has unlocked within her own business, and it has definitely been one of the key elements that has factored into her incredibles success.

We discuss how to identify your brand culture, how to speak that into existence within your team, and how to support your team through that journey, as well as how to hire for the perfect fit, of course. Whether you are ready to hire your first VA or dip your toes into hiring employees, this episode is full of practical tips that will be beneficial to you, no matter where you are on that journey. Make sure to tune into this insightful interview with The Virtual Savvy Founder and powerhouse entrepreneur, Abbey Ashley!

Quarantine gave Abagail every excuse to drop any kind of consistency around movement, and now, a full year later, she is trying to get back at it. She has walked three days in a row, and just yesterday Emylee did her first Peloton bike ride in months. After eight minutes in, she felt like she couldn’t do it, but she kept going. But this isn’t what we are going to be talking about today. We are super excited because it’s been a while since we have done an episode like this, where we share a small tweak we made inside our signature program that was uber effective.

It actually kind of blew us away just how much of a difference it made. It's been almost a year since we made this two-phased change. We want to talk to you about it today because if you are offering services or packages and there are deliverables inside those packages that don’t cost you any money but do cost you time, those are sometimes the easiest things to add into a package to add value. There are also instances where you need to re-evaluate what those deliverables are and whether that thing is actually effective, not only for you but your clients as well.

We always knew there would be this moment where, after doing these profit reports, we would eventually hit our goal, and then we would have to have the conversation about what’s next for us. We alluded to it a bit last month, where we had our first loss in over a year, but no part of Abagail was concerned. It sounds bizarre, but we really stuck things out, made some subtle shifts, and March went fantastically. What a concept! We had a loss and didn’t let it linger in our brains for months on end, which, in turn, would have impacted our business for months on end.

Instead, we did a turnaround and saw some amazing stuff happen for us in March. It's funny because it’s not like we did this massive launch or any other big things. We just checked the calendar right before we recorded this to remind ourselves of what happened last month. We planned some stuff; we talked about some stuff; we did a mini-thing, well, someone else did a mini-thing; we invested in some stuff. That's about it! It was lowkey in terms of what was happening behind the scenes. But so much of what we have been doing over the last year has been about building our monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

When you start the hiring process it can be a challenging time with a lot to think about. There are a lot of decisions to be made about how or why you hire someone at a certain point in your business. We have talked about it in the past but today we want to talk about why it is important that you think first about how and where you will get a return on your hire rather than hiring to save time. This is because we know what hiring to save time looks like and we are in a different space to be able to talk about it. So many people only hire to save time and they should be thinking about it in a bigger way.

We want to have this conversation coming from the space of how we think about it now with Boss Project and lessons we have learned, but also there are one-off hires that Emylee has done for her earring business. She hired for stuff she knew she would save a ton of time on. She also wasn’t the best one to do these tasks and if they were done, she would make money faster. So it is interesting how this question of hiring can be viewed in different scopes based on where you are at in your business.

Hello friends! It has been a minute since we have talked about the other businesses we run. We thought it was high time for a little update because Abagail has something new and exciting that she has launched (by the time you hear this it will have been out for a minute). We are going to talk about that but we also think there have been some decisions that we have made very intentionally in our side businesses that we want to break down the logistics behind.

We share these things with you, first of all, because it is fun to chat about, but it is also fair for you guys to hear this part of the process because it gives you a look behind the curtain of something new and growing. It also shows you the reality of how a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners are, which is multi-passionate!

This is another one of those episodes where Abagail puts Emylee on the spot in front of the audience. She knows nothing and is expected to come up with something out of thin air. For context, we started our business as creative entrepreneurs and designers and all that. What we did not realize we were doing at the time was influencing people. We started this blog, we were putting out content, and ultimately, a large portion of our business has become what we would call affiliate marketing. It makes up a big percentage of what we are doing. So, Abagail has all this background knowledge of what it takes to be an influencer in an affiliate capacity and has made all of these pivots with her second brand to broaden the ways she is bringing in money for this brand. Emylee is admittedly the laziest influencer out there. It is not that she doesn’t influence people; she definitely does, and there are many examples to prove it. In technical terms, Abagail, based on the size of her audience, would be seen as a micro-influencer. There are so many people out there that want to be influencers but they don’t necessarily know what they need to be looking out for. There are some alarming things brands are starting to include in their contracts, and micro-influencers are agreeing to these things, most probably without any idea of what they actually mean. And they could not only negatively impact your business, but they could destroy your online reputation if you do not pay attention to what is going on.

We feel like the anniversary of the global pandemic that is quickly approaching is hitting us really hard! We just want to remind all of you business owners out there that you have been running a business for the last year in the midst of one of the craziest years any of us will ever go through, especially as a collective. For us, running a business in the midst of all this has been the most surprising thing that has ever happened, because March 2020 was the most afraid we have ever been about the future of our business. A year later though, we are now more confident than ever that we will continue to grow!

We have spoken a lot about the different areas of our business that we have invested in and how they change over time. We want to spend today’s profit report for February talking about how these decisions have ultimately affected our profit and how we are looking at this side of things. We want to talk about why things are just incredibly different now than they were last year and the place of greater maturity at which we have arrived with regards to the way we cope with the supposed ups and downs.