Today, we’re cutting the small talk and diving right into part 2 of our conversation. That’s how important we deem this topic to be.

If you own a service-based business, there’s a high chance you’ve encountered a client who wants to change some aspect of your delivery. Usually, this comes up during the sales process, but occasionally it arises immediately after they’ve booked. Today, we’re talking about how to navigate this based on when and where they are wanting to customize the product, and how to handle it at each stage.

When clients feel that they can negotiate price, tinker with the scope, and haggle with you on the deliverables, what do you do? We’re here to help you navigate these complexities.

Today we’re going to talk about the art of the follow-up! Once you’ve pitched your service, it’s possible that you’ll experience potential clients ghosting you, being passive-aggressive towards you, or fighting against the process that you’re trying to put them through. All three of those things have happened to us in the last seven days so we know all about those weird experiences. In an ideal world, people will seamlessly move through your sales process, discovery call, and pitch meeting, and then they’ll pay you. This happens almost half of the time but the other half of the time, you’ll be faced with resistance and objections that you’ll have to work through. Today, we’re going to talk you through how to deal with them!

We’ve all known that kid at school. The one who completely takes over group projects and feels the need to micromanage every, single, little detail. If this sounds just a little too familiar, then you’re in good company! Being a perfectionist is tough, and it can come with a host of insidious bedfellows, like procrastination, self-doubt, and debilitating indecisiveness. But what if you could befriend your perfectionism, and make it your superpower?

While it’s undoubtedly challenging dealing with perfectionism, we want to propose imagining a new way forward that doesn’t rely on your self-doubt. What if, instead of beating ourselves up over our tendency towards perfectionism, we instead embrace the strengths we have to offer? After interfacing with countless clients who struggle with perfectionism, we decided to come up with the Bust the Perfectionism Toolkit. This innovative toolkit is made up of easy-to-implement strategies that allow high-achieving business owners to tackle perfectionism once and for all. Tune in as we discuss the powers and pitfalls of perfectionism, and find out what you can expect from the Bust the Perfectionism Toolkit!

All too often, business owners will be trucking along just fine, reaching their goals and generating profits, but that inner feeling of urgency never quite goes away. This is a little easier to justify early on in business. We think of this as the honeymoon phase, but for business. You see all this potential, and your vision is strong.

Growing something is way more exciting than maintaining something. We don’t give enough credit to the outside validation that you get when you first take the leap and start something new. Oftentimes, if you’re fueled by that, you end up staying significantly smaller than your potential because you keep starting over instead of adding or growing. Is there a better way to approach that feeling of wanting to start all over again?

Finding joy in your work is a wonderful thing. It can energize you, further your drive, and help you push through challenging tasks and deadlines. But it can also have a detrimental effect.

Many of us have fallen into the trap of trying to get all our meaning and joy from one source, whether it’s your partner or your company. The problem with that is that it puts untenable pressure on the people we love the most. It can also cause us to neglect other parts of ourselves, leaving us devastated and adrift when we no longer have the partner, or job, that defined our identity.

Today on the show we delve into the consequences of finding joy in our work. We discuss some of the common traps people fall into when their actions aren’t in alignment with what they want, and how to do the difficult, introspective work of uncovering our true needs and aspirations. Tuning in you’ll learn about the biggest obstacles we’ve seen clients face, and how we can help you overcome them. We also discuss how to find more time in your life and identify exactly what you want for your future self!

Not everything we do at Boss Project is something we recommend to our clients, even though it may have worked for us. For example, we don’t encourage a lot of folks to replicate our partnership model. Oftentimes, you can actually get what you want by following an entirely different path to the one we took to get there. Another example of this is reaching seven figures. Is there a way for you to achieve the life and lifestyle you’re looking for without the challenges that come with adding a zero to your revenue? We’ve been there, and we have the insight to tell you what the journey looks like.

Our very first absolute priority when it comes to our business values, is building a business that is life first. To us, that means that our business structure reflects the season we are in. Seasons can be short or long, but they are intentional choices. You can choose to work full time, build a business, and still respect life first.

What this looks like for us, is allowing ourselves plenty of flexibility even while working full-time hours. When we chose to do business this way, we structured our days in a way where we could still prioritize family and life over work. How it looks is not the point, how it is communicated, and how it is honored, are! Life first looks completely different in every different context - what our team looks like when we’re working, what our team looks like when we are not working. Open and early communication is the essential building block for a life-first business to thrive.

We’ve made it a rule that every single employee has to take both their birthday and their anniversary off from work. That’s just one example of how we’ve built the life-first value into our business, and we’re proud of it! Building a life-first business can look any way you want it to, and it can be the little things, and ultimately our goal is that you have the freedom to choose what you want to prioritize and how that works.

How many times have you struggled to make a decision in business out of fear that you’d make the wrong decision? What if instead, you viewed every decision as an opportunity to learn, rather than succeed or fail? Today on the show we unpack what it means to have an experimental mindset, how to foster that for yourself and within your team, and how it can free you from regret and help you make decisions that will help you learn and grow.

Tuning in you’ll get a taste of what we've been chatting about with our clients inside the incubator; from how unrealistic expectations can warp your mindset, to how to figure out what you really want. We’ve seen so many of our clients struggle to react to success and failure and as a result, we wanted to discuss examples of actionable strategies. Learn what you can implement within your company and your team so that if you're in a similar situation, you have strategies to help you adapt to any situation!

When you’re trying to express a complex psychological feeling or event, but you aren’t familiar with the agreed-upon terms that experts use to describe it, the experience can be incredibly isolating. Today on the show we discuss a recent conversation we encountered that unpacks the differences between having a cognitive bias towards either action or thinking, and the consequences of that bias.

Anyone who has spent some time listening to our show will likely be familiar with the terms being a ‘doer’ or a ‘be-er’. Tuning in, you’ll hear us discuss how being a doer correlates with a cognitive bias towards action, while being a be-er strongly resembles having a cognitive bias towards thinking. We also cover some of the traps that action takers can fall into, including hasty decision-making and why you need to be able to take action while also making time to process and strategize. Tune in for a breakdown of these fascinating topics, as well as insights into some of the steps you can take to shape your cognitive bias!

Having discovery calls, going for coffee dates, and holding pitching meetings with potential clients is something that we’ve noticed that many service-based business owners struggle with in the early years. They feel like they either don’t say enough or they say too much, and this causes a lot of stress and anxiety. In this episode, we want to equip you with the confidence to go into these scenarios feeling like you know exactly what you’re doing!

You don't have to be good at everything you try. And you don't have to only do things that you’re good at. As kids, we’re often far more comfortable with experimentation and trying new things, than we are as adults. When we get older we increasingly feel pressured to stick with what we’re good at and not ‘waste our time’ on things that aren’t directly related to productivity. For perfectionists, it can be particularly difficult to try new things, which can have an adverse effect on decision making abilities.

The term consequences might be rife with negative connotations, but we’re determined to take it back and make it a neutral word! Examining the potential consequences of our decisions is hugely valuable. It can help us determine what we want and fully understand what each choice can offer us. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will work for everyone, nor should there be. Many of us think we should be pursuing relentless growth because that’s what the world tells us we should want, but when you consider the consequences of constantly scaling it becomes apparent how unrealistic (and unpleasant!) that is. Tune in today as we discuss how to unpack the consequences of our decisions, how to make choices based on the season of your business, and much more!

Aside from our wonderful clients in the incubator, our DMs have been popping and we have so many great insights into the hurdles that service-based businesses are facing! One particular issue that continues to pop up, especially as we help people define a high-touch signature service or ultimately focus on a more primary offering (instead of having what we’ve lovingly called the Cheesecake Factory menu of offers), is the need to eliminate other services. Many people we’ve run into are open to the idea but have active clients utilizing those very services and don’t know how to make that transition. The question arises of how to pivot and how to communicate the changes, but the main risk factor that people dwell on is losing the income from those active clients. Well, in this episode, you’ll find out how to gently ease out of specific services with a transition plan, as well as how to inform your clients that you’re eliminating part of their service and raising their price. Tune in to hear why there is no question that you shouldn’t only offer the services you want to and how to get to a point where you’re billing ethically and creating space for rest and creativity!

Referrals are, without a doubt, one of the hottest topics that we have going on inside our world. We are so intentional about you doing business the easiest way possible without having to invest in huge ad spends, or allocate loads of money to marketing budgets, or focus on growing an absurdly huge social media presence. We really want you to focus on connections instead. The vast majority of our clients get booked out with almost exclusively referrals, and as they grow they start experimenting with different strategies.

Today, we want to talk about ten ways to get more referrals in your world. A referral lead is just as real a lead as a stranger! Quit downplaying the quality and impact that referrals can have on your business, just because they felt easier to get. Referrals, by and far, are better quality, will pay better, will be easier to work with, will finish their projects faster, and they also know other dreamy clients which they may end up connecting you to. It literally only takes one dreamy client to connect you to a network of other dreamy clients, and the clients that we see who use that route, reach their goals way more easily, and are happy in their day-to-day business.

The things we hear all the time are either, “I’m doing all the right things but I don’t necessarily know what to focus on next. I don’t know which lever to pull next and I don’t know why I’m feeling so overwhelmed.” Or, “This is so fun and easy! How do I set up myself for success in the future? How do I maintain this and keep growing?” We find that everyone’s always trying to look ahead, yet what’s truly beneficial is understanding the phase that you’re currently in order to clock why things are going well, where they’re going wrong, and what you need to do to move into the next phase. What we forget is that pitfalls are inevitable and that, as things grow, there are going to be roadblocks, hesitations, and frustrations. We are all bound to feel stuck at some point or another we want to assure you that this feeling is normal (and necessary) and that we can help you to get out of it! In this episode, we tackle the three phases we see every service-based business owner move through, fill you in on how we really feel about burnout, and share our greatest wish for every single service-based business owner out there.

If you are a service provider finding yourself in need of a little bit of a serotonin boost and you’re looking for a pep talk from your Biz Fairy Godmothers, this is the episode for you! We have some really valuable reframes for you; some shifts in thinking. We see you in ways that you perhaps don’t see yourself, and we want to share those insights with you. We’re going to share some really cool, kind, impactful things with you today, so prepare to be showered in words of support. It might make you feel uncomfortable and you may have a hard time accepting the compliments, but here’s the thing: it’s because we genuinely care!

No one else is saying these things to you and it’s important to us that we pour back into you in the same way that you’ve poured into us over the years. We are ready for you to believe in yourself in the way that we believe in you. That means listening to the things we’re saying, truly taking them to heart, and allowing them to sink in and make an impact. Tune in to learn about the reframes that service providers need to hear right now and to find out what we see in you (it’s a lot!) so you can believe in yourself in new ways. Never fear, your Biz Fairy Godmothers are here!