Hey everybody we are super excited to have our friend Nikki Porcher on the show today! Nikki is the owner and founder of Buy From a Black Woman, which is an online non-profit organization that is bringing awareness and funding to businesses owned by black women! Nikki has had an amazing journey since starting this initiative and she now showcases a large number of black women business owners in her directory, Instagram, and in her shop. A fearless and natural creative, Nikki is so much fun to talk to and we know you are going to love this conversation too! During the episode we hear about this incredible journey that she has been on, starting with a blog, which became a hot Instagram account, then a directory and now a non-profit organization.

She currently gives out grants to black women to start their business and get off the ground, providing a network of support and knowledge to aid them in their pursuits. We have to admit we learned a lot in this conversation and Nikki is so open in sharing with us and we ended this chat just wanting to know more, support more and spread the love! There are so many great businesses in her directory and we should all be buying from them! It is so easy to do a little research, branch out a little further and diversify your world! Nikki is such a great example of turning your passion into something amazing and impactful and to be honest her story really reiterates a lot of what we always say!

Hi guys! Today’s episode is a really big deal. We are busting with excitement to share with you our motivation behind changing a key aspect of our business—the name! When you start a new company, the last thing you think about is changing it. Even though change can be terrifying, we hope that you will be equally as enthusiastic about the new direction we are moving into as we are. We assure you that we will do everything possible to continue serving you to the best of our abilities, and we can almost guarantee that you will love this change as much as we do.

Part of the name changing process involves making our brand more inclusive by collaborating with online entrepreneurs who will be educating you on a wide range of topics. You will not be hearing from only us in future but will be enriched by the knowledge of a plethora of experts in various fields of business. Be sure to tune in today to join in our celebrations and to find out all the cool new things we are going to be offering you.

Today we welcome Erin Abernathy & Steph Pulido from Out of Office Media. We are so excited to have them here on the Strategy Hour Podcast to talk about working with micro-influencers and how brands can create strong content and build a really engaged audience. Our guests are best friends, the co-founders of their company, and they have recently been recognized by Forbes! Their goal is to serve and interact with female millennials and they are now based in New York City. In their business they work with micro-influencers, or those that have less than about 10k followers on social media, to grow their following and in turn aid a brand’s goals. This is really about building a small yet strong tribe whether you are a solopreneur, budding influencer or big brand.

So if you are what may be called a micro-influencer and would like to dabble in working with brands and companies, creating another revenue stream, this episode might be just the thing you have been looking for. Erin and Steph offer a bunch of great strategies to get started, boost engagement, and niche down your market. So no matter what business or field you are in this can help you get to where you need to be. So without further ado, let’s dive in!

Hi everybody! On today’s show we are talking about one of our favorite things — personality tests! If you know us at all you know we can’t get enough of these kind of exercises and understanding where we fit into each and every system. Today we will be discussing Enneagrams, our types, and Emylee’s controversial opinion that Abagail was mistyped in her first assessment. Enneagrams are relatively new to us, with Abagail doing hers first, just under a year ago. However, Emylee still feels she has enough expertise to assert some claims over Abbie’s type and what it really is, contrary to the results.

We are doing this episode in the lead up to the Enneagram and Coffee Summit that is happening very soon, which we will be speaking at! So to get you excited for that, we will be spilling the beans on everything we know about the subject and how we relate to it. Remember to go get your tickets for the summit while you still have time! And if you haven’t already done the test, go take it immediately. You know you want another way to understand yourself! In the meantime, tune in to today’s episode for an in-depth look at how it all works.

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast! Today our guest is Suzi Istvan from Splendidly Curious. Suzi is a brand strategist, marketing expert and has many years of experience working with a wide variety of different types of companies and organizations. She lives in upstate New York with her beautiful big family and we cannot wait to share this amazing conversation with y’all! Suzi is here to tell us about the roles of marketing director and integrator and how they can take your business from lighting up to burning hot! If your biz is currently small and just starting out or you are making a step up to the next level, trust us, this episode is going to help a ton!

The chat was amazing and enlightening for us and we gained so much just talking to Suzi, so we are sure there will be a treasure trove of stuff for you to mine in here! During the conversation, Suzi even interviews us a little bit, which was fun! We cover how to build and coordinate your team cleverly and finding that all important person who is as invested in your business as you are. This role, which Suzi and others have dubbed the integrator, can take a lot off of your hands and free up more time for you to explore and double down on your areas of genius. In the end, you are looking for someone who thinks of your business as their business and who can free up your mental load, so you can pursue all your dreams with more energy and vigor!

Hey everybody and welcome back to The Strategy Hour! Today we are talking PR, media, and marketing with Christina Nicholson of the Media Maven. Christina was in news broadcasting for many years before she decided to start her PR firm and now helps businesses grow their brands by gaining exposure and using it wisely. Today’s show has Abagail riding solo as Emylee is away with a sick little one, but do not fear! It promises to be just as jam-packed and dynamic as usual with such an amazing guest.

Inside this episode, we will be talking about how to get more media coverage and how to utilize it, getting comfortable in front of a camera and much more! Christina also talks about common mistakes and simple tips for getting the most of out of your PR. As an industry expert from the other side of the fence, Christina has a lot of wisdom to share on how to get noticed and present well. We get into reaching out, who are the best people to speak to, and ways to make the process of marketing yourself more enjoyable for better results. For all of this and a whole lot more, you know what to do!

On today’s show we’re doing things a little differently and taking you through a process that we believe can make a world of difference in your life! This episode will be all about inventing a new possibility in your life, and you’ll see just what a shift this can make. Abagail tried out this exercise recently and found it super helpful and enlightening, so we could not resist sharing it with our listeners. Full disclaimer though, it might be a bit of bumpy ride because let’s face it, most things that help you grow are not pain free. But we promise you’ll thank us in the end!

Emylee will be going through the guided exercise for the first time during the episode and you can join in with he. We can all get down to the nitty gritty together! A lot of the time we deal with the positive and negative aspects of our lives in repeated patterns of behavior that do not allow for very much progress. The process we will be detailing is simple and straightforward, yet it provides a lot of insight and hope into how small adjustments can change our lives in big ways. So if you’re game, grab your favorite notepad and buckle in, we’re going deep!

Hello all of you wonderful listeners! We are so glad to have you back for this very important episode of our podcast! You know what time of year it is and you know we have done this before. Yes, it is time for us to each choose a word of intention for the coming year and to make sure that 2019 is the best one yet! While preparing for this episode we listened back to some of our previous words and New Years’ ideas and got some serious flashbacks! They feel so long ago but at the same time are still fresh in our minds.

Now we have to be honest, we came up with these words this morning! But at the same time we have probably been mentally preparing these ideas for ages now and in the episode you will hear all the background to why we chose our specific words and the pieces that came together to make this quick decision. We would also love to hear your own words for the coming year, so when you are done listening to this episode please share them with us, we would love to connect and affirm your choices. It is so impactful to communicate these ideas, it creates a sense of accountability and commitment!

On today’s episode we are super-duper excited to host Ashley Knight of The Hello Boss Community. Ashley founded the community as a means to support and bolster other businesswomen who were in the same boat as her. Through her group she is able to teach and coach strategy to an ever growing number of dedicated members and she loves it! And we love her for it! Here at The Strategy Hour Podcast we know the value the of groups we have run and been a part of, they can be the lifeboat bringing you back in when you are out at sea, so we know exactly what Ashley is talking about!

In our discussion we cover the early stages of starting a supportive community, relationships within this space, real world events, social media, sensitivity masterminds and much more. Ashley is one of the most dedicated community founders we have spoken to and we are sure her attitude and advice is going to be wonderfully useful and inspiring to all of our listeners. So whether you are part of an online community or looking to start one yourself, this is definitely the episode for you. Listen in to get the low-down.

Hello all you business badasses and wonderful women! We are so glad to have you here for yet another episode of our little podcast. This week the The Strategy Hour is all about dealing with what can be a very tricky and irritating problem. Yup, you guessed it: how can you go about approaching the issue of people not understanding what your job really is? Most of us entrepreneurs and online business owners have encountered this dynamic in some way and it can be pretty tiresome and frequent!

So what are we to say and do in these situations? Whether it’s at a family gathering or in another social or business setting, we want to talk a little about what it’s like and share a few ideas on how to deal with this. To help us unpack the issue we have invited our dear friend Courtney Foster-Donahue who shares our frustrations in these regards and she has some great advice for all of you introverts out there that you are not going to want to miss. So without further ado, let’s get into it!

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of your favorite biz podcast! Here at the Strategy Hour we always hope to give you the best advice, tools, and inspiration to get that business of yours popping and today is no different. This episode is all about a certain myth that has us a bit hot under the collar and we want nothing more than to dispel it! It goes something along the lines of not being able to reach your goals because of being overwhelmed by too much content and too many things to do. Now, we know this feeling, so don’t think it’s just you! But we are also here to tell you, get off your backside and start working because it is just not true and it is certainly no excuse to not put in the work!

So today we are going to be putting this myth to rest and giving you the fire and energy to go and get out of that overwhelmed funk! Okay? Great! We’ll be talking about how to interact with resources and content in an effective way and connect the dots between your to do list and the strategies you hear about. We implore you again and again to take action, a constant reminder throughout the episode, so take heed! And don’t worry, we also get into how we have slipped up in these ways over the past year and talk about some of the missteps we took in this regard. An important takeaway is the idea of co-working and accountability groups, something we have used — especially when starting out — to great effect. We finish off the chat thinking about ways to simplify your business and identifying your KPIs and critical numbers. So let’s get right into it!

Hello all you wonderful listeners out there! Today we have a great episode for you and one that is a little out of the ordinary. We are chatting with Kinzie Ferguson who is a boudoir photographer and a great friend of ours too! This conversation is going to be all about how Kinzie recently manifested her dream studio space and the process that allowed her to do it. This was a big deal for her and the experience really drove home some things that Kinzie believes in. We will also be chatting about how Kinzie goes about empowering people and her philosophy towards compliments, positivity and intentionality.

It was recently Kinzie’s birthday and we decided pretty spontaneously to have this conversation at her party! This episode has it all, we talk about the importance of hard work and family, intentionality and just serving your people as best you can. We are going to getting kind of woo today, which is something we have been wanting to do for a while and this was the perfect excuse. We will be talking tarot readings, birth charts, the moon, and more. So get strapped in, we are going deep!

Hey everybody and welcome to another fantastic episode of The Strategy Hour Podcast! Today we are joined by one of our favorite people in the world, a real internet bestie and the Instagram King, Tyler J. McCall! Tyler is here to talk to us about his speciality - how to get Instagram working for you immediately. Of course, Instagram, like all social platforms is constantly evolving so Tyler will be talking about what the best strategies are right now, but also looking at some of the more timeless rules of the framework. Tyler has helped a huge amount of entrepreneurs (including us!) to grow their Instagram following and engagement through the lessons he teaches. For Tyler, it really is quite simple: if you follow a few easy rules, have fun, and bring your own personality to your account you really can’t go wrong!

During our conversation we cover some of the basics around content and captions and the move away from highly curated profiles. Tyler also stresses the importance of knowledge of your audience and how this informs your strategy. We get into the nitty gritty of telling your brand’s story and how to convey this in an effective and engaging way as well as looking at the values that underscore everything that you post. One of the biggest recent developments on Instagram is obviously the Stories feature and Tyler breaks down some lessons for approaching that area and also reiterates just how important they are to your reach, engagement, and potential profits. Lastly, we cover some tips and ideas for personal versus business profiles and how to go about starting out on the platform for newbies. Jump in, it’s going to be a fun ride!

Welcome back to another episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast with your favorite business sisters! We have a great episode in store for you today in which we will be talking to our friend Parijat Deshpande about her experiences self publishing an Amazon bestseller. Parijat is a high risk pregnancy expert and decided to turn her work and wisdom into a book called Pregnancy Brain, which has quickly become a hit and is selling fast since it was published! We chat about what led to the writing and publishing of Pregnancy Brain and what that process was like, from start to finish.

Parijat is a great example of someone taking their business and turning it into something else, namely a distributable and profitable outlet. This is one way that a one-on-one business can be scaled to create more revenue and reach. During our discussion Parijat takes us through the lessons she learned over the last year and a half as she was able to very quickly move from deciding on creating the book to selling it. She really is an inspiration and we at TCC hope she can inspire you to reach your dreams and get your book out of your head and out into the world! We chat about editors, design choices, the writing process and the ups and downs of becoming and author. All things we know you are dying to hear about so without further ado, let’s jump right in!

Welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast all of you wonderful and beautiful business badasses! We are so excited about today’s show and believe us when we say it’s an extra special one. Our guest today is Alma Omeralovic, who we met a few months ago when Amanda Boleyn brought her out at a speaking event and she guided a group of us through a meditation. We both felt an instant affinity for her and immediately and excitedly asked if she would join us on the show for a taste of what her mediation practice has to offer. So today we have a 30 minute, uninterrupted meditation, guided by Alma, followed by a short discussion on our experiences and questions. Sounds great, don’t you think?

This is an episode you may want to come back to a few times, depending on your needs. If you do not make it through all 30 minutes the first time, that’s okay, just go at your own pace. We recommend marking when the actual meditation starts in the audio so that you can skip directly to that part each time you would like to practice it. Another point we would like to make here, and something Alma mentions in our discussion, is that you do not have to have some perfect environment or situation to begin. We often might put off something like mediation because we do not have a perfectly serene, empty room, Alma says one of her favorite places to meditate is on the train or at the airport! So no excuses! Just try do as much as you can and see how you feel, it will definitely be a learning experience. So make yourself comfortable, find a gentle seat and keep an open mind.