This week we dive into the top missteps we see businesses making when they want to grow. Side effects may include: burnout, overwhelm, stress, shutting down your business, getting a full-time job that you hate, or not reaching the income goals that you say that you want to achieve. We’re here to interrupt that vicious cycle and get a fresh perspective on exactly what’s causing these troublesome symptoms in your business!

This episode is about friendships; how you make them, how you keep them, how you maintain them, how you can be a better friend, how you let go of old friendships. Every question that you have felt uncomfortable asking about how to make friends in the online space or in the real world space is going to be answered on today’s show. Today’s guest, Danielle Bayard Jackson, from BetterFemaleFriendships.com and host of the Friend Forward Podcast. She is on a mission to help women business owners create and maintain better friendships as adults.

You’re going to want to listen to this episode multiple times because you’re going to get so many actionable steps to take. We’re excited for you, as well as ourselves because we’ve experienced the loneliness that comes from knowing a lot of people but not having deep connections with them. We hope that so many friendships are made because of this episode!

Today we want to talk to all of you amazingly talented, creative people, who miss doing the thing they actually started their business for. We know that so many of you are crushing it, you have no problem landing clients, you are super busy, yet you feel like you’ve moved away from the thing that you really love doing. We want to let you know that you can step out of that, you have so much potential to grow into that creative director seat. Often, CEO status feels not totally in alignment for a lot of service-based businesses. Not that you don’t want to run a company of high caliber, but you still want to be delivering on the service, and oftentimes being in the CEO seat means that you don’t get to do that anymore.

This week we get together with the multi-talented Tracy Litt: a mindset coach, spiritual advisor, rapid transformational hypnotherapist, best-selling author, and TEDx speaker. She is the founder of The Litt Factor, a company that supports high-achieving female leaders and entrepreneurs to understand and leverage their personal power. In our conversation, we delve into the life-changing effects of leaning into ease and finding calm. We unpack how the spiritual elements of your humanity impact not only our thoughts but also your potential business growth.

We discuss the number one way to grow your list through low-priced, high-value digital products, how to get paid and grow a list of customers rather than subscribers, and how to use the W.A.N.D. Method to figure out exactly what your Pocket Products™ should be. If you haven’t been introduced to Courtney yet, you’re in for a real treat! Tune in, get out your notebook, and grab a fresh cup of coffee, because we’re pretty sure you’ll be ready to hit the ground running after this episode!

While we can’t tell you what this episode is going to look like, we can tell you where we are at. Being an entrepreneur is hard. It presents challenges that you don’t anticipate. Things pop up that you never imagined dealing with and you are pushed to grow as a person as you continue to grow your business. We wish we could say that it was always easy or that we always know what to do, but we don’t. The idea for this episode started when Emylee inboxed Jessica Eley and their conversation led to a lot of tears.

We want to preface this conversation by saying there are a handful of conversations that we have had like this where we are truly in the weeds and workshopping things as we go. We will probably get clarity just by talking it out with you guys and we love that we have the space to do that. It is not going to be an episode that ends with a resounding conclusion or strategy. We want to talk about the challenges that come with growth and clear out some of the junk in our brains in the hope that you won’t feel as alone if you were thinking some of the same things.

In this episode, we share some of the surprising influencers in your business that could be distracting you from making CEO decisions, how to execute based on where you want to be versus where you are today, and when to shift from finite thinking to future-focused thinking. We also highlight the importance of trusting your intuition, not letting your goals hold you back, and taking your future into your own hands, so make sure to tune in today!

Today on the podcast, we have Courtney Chaal. She is a copywriter turned business coach obsessed with making complex concepts (like business models and sales copy) simple and tangible to help regular people achieve big results. She is a big believer in the power of offering a signature service as the best way to start making a full-time income online. And services are the theme for today’s episode. If you have ever thought about offering something you kind of, sort of, maybe know how to do to some people you kind of, maybe, sort of like, then this episode is going to be a really good framework for how to get started. We get into Courtney’s first clients, how she niched down to identify her value proposition, and how you can do the same thing. Courtney shares tips she would give new service providers after they have just landed their first client, and advice on what to do next. We also talk about something we’ve never mentioned on the podcast before: the dad bod level of business, so if you want to find out what that’s all about, make sure you stay tuned.

If you have been listening to us for a minute, you will have heard us alluding to the fact that we are headed toward a growth phase of our business and our lives. We were having a conversation the other day about why we are ready for this now versus when we weren't, what's different, and what we think we need to shift in order to do it. One of the things that came up is that we realized that we had perfected delegating tasks in our business that stabilize it, make it do the thing that it's meant to be doing, and not let it slip back and fall.

On the flip side, what we haven't done and what we don't know how to do yet is delegate, hire for, plan and help other people grow the business. So, we talked about this the other day, when just a couple of years ago, if one of us was out of the office, there would be a direct impact on our sales because there would be less posting on social media and less content creation, which means we would have to plan and account for that. We grew out of that phase, so now one of us can head off for a week, and it does not impact our sales at all! This is fantastic, but the next phase for us is about more than just being able to go on vacation and see the business grow; it's about not having to be one of the two brains that contribute to the growth.

Today, on the podcast, we welcome Emily Walker. She helps brilliant entrepreneurs turn their big ideas into powerful and profitable courses so they can improve thousands of other people’s lives while building more spaciousness into their own. Having worked with a diverse range of clientele all over the globe, from groundbreaking courses and bestselling authors to seven-figure mindset queens, Emily knows that, sure, you can just dive in and start teaching online, but taking that knowledge and tweaking it into something actionable is not always easy.

If you have ever wanted to create a course, a program, a workshop, a masterclass, a tiny offer, a big offer, it doesn’t matter; this episode is going to give you a lot of great things to think about before you get started! Emily shares her perspective on creating content by doing equal parts what feels fun and good to you while also serving your audience, your clients, or your future students. It’s a blend of both worlds, and Abigail and Emylee certainly walked away from this conversation with a lot of ideas and questions to ask themselves as they refresh some of their own programs, and we know you will too!

Today we are going to talk about doing #allthethings, or rather, not doing them. We know a lot of you have so many things on your plate and are really struggling with what to let go of. You are feeling married to every department that you are the head of, and not really seeing or understanding how you could give up any of those things. So with that in mind, we want to holler at you in the way that we do best and permit you and help you let go of some stuff if you have been trudging along in your workspace, your day, and your business.

We used to be the people who didn’t only not want to pay to give up things but also were super intimidated and concerned with delegation. It has been something we have had to work hard to do because we used to be aware of everything that happens in our business and we were at the point where if we didn’t let go of some of it, we were going to slow down the business. So we have had some life experience in this department and hope you can take away some of the lessons we have learned and apply them in your own life and business after this episode!

In today’s episode, we welcome Rachel Rodgers, a woman of color, mother of four, and seven-figure business owner – in that order. Rachel started her career working on The Hill with nonprofits, federal judges, and Hillary Clinton. When she realized that changing the world is easier when you have some cash in your bank account, she decided to build a million-dollar business and then teach other women how to do the same. Her new book, We Should All Be Millionaires, from Harper’s Leadership is out now! (as of release, not recording)

For this show, we break down our favorite parts of Rachel’s book, which not only addresses our ingrained mindsets around money issues but also provides activities you can do, from homework assignments to different mindset reframes to help you better your headspace, grow, and move forward, whether you have a business or you just want to be a literal millionaire!

Today on our show, we have Ariel Kuhn, who started out as a photographer and has since grown her business to focus more on brand strategy, working with small business owners as they figure out how to grow online. She helps these businesses with everything from brand strategy to photography, copywriting, web design, and mentorship so they can take their business to the next level. Ariel has been around the Boss Project / TCC block for a while, and she is actually a current Strategy Academy student. She shares the evolution of her business, why she decided to invest in the program, the art of her pivot, what it means to her to feel good about what you’re doing in your business, and what to do with all the extra ideas you might have. We also discuss various things she has learned in the program that could help other small business owners who are in a similar position. So, if you have an existing business and have been stressing out about all of the brilliant ideas you have in your brain and what to do next, this episode will give you clarity.

Today on the podcast we have Kristin Ostrander from Mommy Income. She is an e-commerce expert who got her start 17 years ago on eBay. She has since transitioned to Amazon where she has been a serial entrepreneur who has learned all the ins and outs of how to run a successful wholesale business selling on the platform. Today she touches on her wholesale bundle system and how she’s helped thousands of students through her online course and podcast.

In this episode, we talk about a product offering, revenue stream, and selling platform that we’ve never talked about on the podcast before: Amazon, and more specifically, selling wholesale bundles on Amazon. Honestly, there was so much information that we did not know. So we really think you guys will get a lot of good ideas from this episode if you’re interested in selling a new product, getting a second stream of revenue up and running or just testing your toes in running a business that might be a little different to what everyone else is doing. Kristin breaks down her strategies in the order that she did stuff really, really well, and has some incredible resources for you guys to keep learning if you want to find out how to sell on Amazon. We’re sure this show will give you a lot of great ideas!

Back in the day, we recorded an entire series on starting your business and one of the first subjects we talked about was adopting a profit-first mentality. Here’s the thing, we re-looked at that episode and have so many more things to say! The way we run our business has dramatically shifted in the last 12 months and because of that, we have so many things to say to people who are just getting started. Even if you have an established business, we have some thoughts about what you should be doing differently when it comes to your dollar bills.

We recorded that first episode about adopting a profit-first mentality in February of 2018 but we honestly didn’t really put our ideas into practice until 2020! It took two years for us to learn how to do that, so we are going to save you that time today. We are not saying that our first episode has no value, but now that we have actually been through the trenches, this is the episode you want!