Today, we’re talking about what it is like to start to view your business through a new lens, specifically the new lens that we’ve been looking at our business through; the hybrid. What is a hybrid business model and how does it infiltrate into all the areas of our business that we’re running? Our hybrid thought process is something that has shifted how we view our business, from looking at each piece separately to understanding it as a coherent whole. A lot of this new thinking centers around our approach to hiring people and managing their roles, as well as our own roles, in our business.

As you guys know, when we learn or uncover something we like to immediately turn around and workshop it here on the podcast because it helps us wrap our brains around it. We are by no means at the point where we have a complete understanding of what our hybrid business model means, we’re still at the early stages of discovery. It’s important for you to have context so you need to hear a bit of the background and how a late-night moment allowed us to open our eyes to the value of a hybrid model. So, join us on the journey!

In this week’s episode, we take a look at the role of the integrator in online businesses. We discuss how the role has come about, what exactly it entails, and how hiring the wrong integrator places your business in jeopardy. While the role has gained significant traction in the last few years as a necessary step for any expanding online business, there are also some serious pitfalls that need to be considered!

Are you tired of hearing our voices yet? We hope not because guess what just launched? Another freaking podcast! More words for your ear boxes in our voices. It's been so exciting to watch people’s reactions when they hear this is a thing. They'll say that they’ve been listening to the show for years, but then the questions start rolling in about the new show, “Where is it?” or, “I can’t find it,” or “How do I get access?” So, we are here, on our current podcast, to tell you about our new podcast that’s just launched, and we want to talk to you about how you can get access and what’s all involved because this is big news folks. We will talk about some high-level deets and what you can do to get inside.

Today’s guest is Kira La Forgia, someone who actually enjoys 1099s, W2s, FMLA, and FLSA; you know, all the human resources stuff that usually goes right over your head! Her operations consulting company, Paradigm Consulting, provides resources to online-based business owners that put people's operations at the center of the organizational structure. Kira knows how to project, streamline, and scale businesses, working with leaders in their fields to blend their strengths, passions, and experiences into their unique company culture and develop a robust hiring and growth strategy, as well as providing you with the people you need to move your business forward!

In this episode, we talk about what that looks like at different stages and Kira shares her top hiring tips for growing small businesses. Abagail and Emylee actually hired Kira as a consultant for their own company as they were phasing into growth and hiring employees, which is why we invited her on the show to share her take on small businesses, or businesses who are hiring contractors or virtual assistants, even for the first time. Kira shares some of the things you can set up to better your experience with contractors, the do’s and don’ts when it comes to contractors versus employees, and everything you need to know about your employee handbook, as well as how you can make the onboarding process, associated learning curves, and mindset shifts around hiring a whole lot easier!

We also touch on HR basics for small teams looking to hire contractors and employees, some of the mindset shifts you need to make when it comes to your team members, plus a new way of looking at org charts and what you need to do differently. We all want a scalable business model with no limit on revenue, which is why Kira’s insights are so valuable. Make sure not to miss this incredible and informative conversation, packed full of practical advice that you can implement today!

We are back here with another fan favorite: profit reports! Let's talk about all the things we did in July and how much money our products made. We love the profit reports because they are such a great opportunity to break down what’s been successful in our business. They also give us a chance to reflect on the things we did, the things we worked on, what we would do differently, and how it would ultimately affect the bottom line because that’s what this is all about. It's not revenue or how much income we generated; it’s about the profit we make in our business. For a while now, Abagail has been talking about using percentages to divide up your profits, and recently, she had a question about a line item. So, she asked our bookkeeping company what some of their recommendations are. They work with hundreds of online businesses in the space we are in, and they have an understanding of the breakdown of things. What made her so happy is that the things we have been working so hard on are the top amounts we should be searching for. This isn’t arbitrary and doesn’t just apply to our business; it’s applicable across the board! And we take a lot of pride in setting our business up in this way. That is also why we share these as percentages because the amount can throw people off if their businesses are not in the same arena or do not have the same goals. But there are percentages that literal professionals recommend businesses are at in terms of profit, or team, or education, or advertising. So, knowing when you’re in that ballpark is really, really reassuring as you continue to make a decision.

We are here for part 2 of our story. First of all, if you haven’t listened to part 1, it’s one of our recent episodes right before this one. We went back–to–back with our voices and no guests. This is a two-parter, so if you haven’t listened to the first one, we highly recommend that you pause and go back to that one before carrying on with this episode. So, you are here and ready for part 2. We want to start this episode with a little preface, some boundaries, and we want to share the weirdness of being vulnerable online and in the internet space. These are deeply personal parts of our stories, and we are going to dive in and share a lot with you today. There is a good chunk of you who have been around for a really long time, and you will have heard bits and pieces of our story. But there is an even bigger chunk of you who have no idea what happened for us in 2016, a really big year for us in terms of pivoting personally and within our business. It literally changed every aspect of our lives and shaped the way we do business, and that’s what we will talk about today.

On today’s show, we wanted to take you back in time a little bit and talk about the beginning stages of our business. We so often get asked, ‘How did this all start and why does it exist in the way it does today?” We think there are some incredible takeaways from the early part of our journey that we don’t often talk about but which have shaped the mission and vision of our business as we have continued to grow and make an impact in the world of online business. It has been interesting uncovering some of our story through the work that we have been doing with Rachel’s coaching program in which we are currently enrolled.

We have struggled to frame our story because it breaks the mold of how origin stories are usually told, in the sense that there are two of us, not one. Often we have felt that sharing our feelings and thinking out loud on this podcast has helped us find clarity, so we wanted to use this episode to tell our story! We hope that if you had some things holding you back from telling your own story that this episode might help you step outside your comfort zone and share a little more about yourself.

Today on the podcast, we have Pri. She’s an award-winning SEO strategist, Google Analytics expert, and Founder of Brilliantly Visible. Pri is based in London, and her work is frequently shared as an example of best practices in action at industry events in the UK. With her signature PROPS method, Pri helps people build out datasets and create simple, automated metric dashboards that help them answer some of the most important questions they have in their business: what are my results, and how am I getting them? Those are two really helpful things to be mindful of in your business when you are growing from a data and analytically-driven place, but also in a place that’s in alignment with how you want to run your business and the decisions that you want to be making. If you have been avoiding looking at your data to see if you are actually getting the results you want, or if you are feeling overwhelmed about how to make decisions based on the results you are getting, this is the show for you! You will walk away with so many tips on how to make smart, intentional decisions in your business.

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!