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).