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.

Are you ready to join us on a journey back in time? We’re taking you back about 40 days to talk about our August numbers. We did so many things in August. It was a whirlwind of a summer! In today’s episode, we’re going to give you the scoop of what’s happening in our business in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you get “comparisonitis,” because there’s nothing worse than that. We approach these profit reports from a strategy perspective and what works for us, and we share achievable percentages which will allow you to look at your own business and decide what does and doesn’t make sense for you.

We started doing profit reports almost two years ago, and these involve us talking about profits and percentages and our goal of achieving a certain profit for our business. If you go do a binge listen of all of the profit reports we’ve done so far, you’ll get some great insights into our business and our brains.

Today on the podcast, we have Gwen Lane, who has been through quite the evolution. She was a digital marketer turned lifestyle blogger and is now the founder of a Seven-Figure Influencer Program. She helps content creators and influences monetize through premium partnerships and digital offers. She has worked with crazy brands over the years, and she's also sold her business. Gwen breaks down two strategies: one where she sold her business that she started as a side hustle blog and what it means to be an influencer, what it requires to be in that space, and more. You're going to learn so much from Gwen.

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!

Our guest today is Meg Clark, the owner and founder of Clapping Dog Media, where she is the master of growing organic traffic. Using a combination of data, proven techniques, and years of experience, she attracts web visitors that not only stick around, but turn into paying customers. Simply put, she connects the dots of data to get your business found!

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!

If you’ve been dipping your toe into the ad space lately, you would have been hearing that a lot has changed. Although people say that every year and the changes are usually not so significant, this year is different; because of some really big Apple changes, the game kind of did change, and we now have to think about a whole lot of new things when it comes to paid advertising. In this episode, we are joined by Tony Rulli, co-founder of the digital marketing agency, Intentional Spark.

Today, Tony is going to be going over what those changes actually mean for marketers and advertisers, and he’s going to share his best recommendations for how to not necessarily combat those changes (because you can’t really) but how to still get the information that you need to sell your product or service.

Today, we want to talk about what it takes to build a sustainable business. One that is focused on making income for the long term, and some of the projects we are focused on internally that we think are just a little bit different to what we see other online business owners spending their time and energy on. To continue with our analogy from last time where we talked about your “Tinder date", we’re now going to segue into "How to make the relationship a bit more official”.

But keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be forever. You’re not necessarily married to everything you put out into the world, but there is some commitment required when you start to think about how you build a business that creates sustainable, consistent cash flow. So if you want to hear about our helpful hints and top tips for creating that amazing content your business needs, let's get into it!

Today on the podcast, we are joined by our good friends from Dubsado, co-founder and CEO, Becca Berg and Sam Gioia from their product department. Most of our listeners are well aware that we are big fans of Dubsado and how they help businesses thrive by taking away the busywork. Dubsado is a fantastic platform, especially for small businesses! They have created an all-in-one system that helps you stay in motion, build relationships, schedule appointments, and create workflows to streamline your projects from start to finish.

In this episode, we chat with Becca and Sam about the many new features Dubsado has in store for its users. We hear about how they’re finding innovative ways to interrogate and test the usability of their platform, and the pressure and sense of overwhelm that comes with a desire to make your software, service, and product perfect before releasing it to the public. As a response to this challenge, we examine how you can break that intimidating perfection down into tangible goals and steps, allowing you to accurately view the progress you’re making on the elements you want to improve for your clients, students, or anyone else you may be working with.

We cover a host of concepts in this episode that are relevant to anyone, not just software companies, making this an excellent listen for anyone interested in improving products and services for their clients! Dubsado has an ethos of service, which resonates strongly with Abagail and Emylee as ex-service-based owners. At our core, we are both driven by how to best serve our clients and customers, but this episode offers some excellent ideas that can be implemented in any business and is also an exciting behind-the-scenes look at Dubsado’s new features that they’ll be rolling out soon. Be sure to tune in to this information-packed episode on all things development, customer service, and so much more!

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.