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!

After serving clients one-on-one, we ultimately changed the entire landscape of our business, yet we didn’t even realize that’s what we were doing! If we could go back in time, there are so many things we would do differently, and today, we’re going to share them with you. When we got to a certain stage of business, we froze up and felt like we were on an island. We had no idea what the next step should be and it felt like everyone else had all of the answers. So many of our clients reach the same phase where they hit a milestone marker and feel like there's something that they’re missing, like a missing piece of information; a formula, or a blueprint.

If you feel like million-dollar businesses are gatekeeping this information, the truth is, some of them are! If you’re at the stage of hitting a quarter of a million dollars and don’t know where to go from here, we’re here to tell you. Consider us your Fairy Godmothers of Business Past, telling you your future so you can really decipher what you want to focus on in this phase! Tune in to find out which things you’re tying to success that need to be let go.

As most of our listeners at Boss Project know, Abagail is our CFO and sits in HR as well. She has worked hand in hand with plenty of amazing people in HR to learn about the hiring process for a company. She has single-handedly shifted her team from just Emylee and Abagail, to exploring contractors, part-time employees, full-time employees, and pretty much everything in between! Inside the incubator, she has started to have conversations about hiring, and she has plenty of wisdom to share from all of this experience.

Most business owners struggle with follow-through. The reason why Boss Project has been successful is that where Abagail struggles to see things through, Emylee excels! This formula, along with having the team to support it, has been a winning recipe for us. If you’re a solo business owner, you could be leaving money on the table for this reason. That’s where the magic of having help, even for ten to fifteen hours a month, comes in.

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!

Today we’re going to talk about offering too many services and how to transition out of your Cheesecake Factory phase, namely, having way too many items on your menu. In a recent episode, we discussed narrowing down your services, and what it would look like to have conversations with your existing clientele about changing their service or potentially even eliminating their service altogether. Today’s episode is for those of you who are too scared to even consider this option!

Tuning in you’ll hear us tackle how to make this transition and why it doesn’t need to entail massive sacrifices. We realize that everyone has different needs and limitations. So whether you want to make your transition in twelve days or twelve months is completely up to you! In our conversation, we break down how to streamline your packages by asking yourself the right questions and what you should know about clients when creating your offers. We also talk about the immense possibilities that open up from living in your expertise, and what it means to make your life your career. If you can't even imagine reducing the number of options you have available to your clients and want to discover how to overcome your fear, then this episode is for you!

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!

Today, we are so pumped to tell you the story of Krystina, a member of our community who has managed to get back nine full-time weeks of work at a mind-blowingly minimal cost! To set the stage, our advanced training promise is to help you make more money and work less. We’re helping you to design a life-first business and be more intentional about your hours. How you spend that time is ultimately up to you. The way we work and hustle with intention, launch, serve, grow, or reset is all based on the life-first bubble. This means that there are dedicated times for work and free times to either introduce more growth or introduce rest and, if there’s one thing we want our clients to walk away with, it’s the empowerment to choose what to use that time for. In this episode, we not only share Krystina’s result but the full circle moment she had around how she gained that time, so make sure to tune in today!

We have now done multiple callouts, promotions and launches of the Incubator. We've had hundreds of applications and we’re working with incredible clients inside the program. And if you’re not one of them, you should be! If you’re scared to start a conversation with us, you need to get rid of that feeling right now because we are really not scary at all. You can literally ask us anything, we have no boundaries when it comes to helping our clients. We’re here to help you change your business for the better, so don’t waste any more time stuck where you are!

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.

Spring has indeed sprung and apart from our gardening rituals, we have so many new things happening in the Boss Project world! The most pressing news on the street for the month of April 2022 is we have completely exploded the Creative Template Shop and it is officially available as its own entity on all platforms! As you guys have noticed, the conversations here at Boss Project have up-leveled as our business and our clients’ businesses have up-leveled, yet our educational spirit lives on and we want to keep providing actionable, bite-sized, tutorial content for growing business owners.

Our goal is to help you see quick wins with our incredible templates, marketing, and strategy. Join now on creativetemplateshop.com with discount code SAVE20 to save on our annual membership, and stay tuned for tips on how to realign expectations of scope with existing clients and how to get clear on creating a business for yourself rather than a job! In this episode, you’ll also discover the most common admin or general VA issue that arises when it comes to providing results for clients.

If you’re a true crime fan and you enjoy a scandalous story about fraud, you’ve definitely spent some time thinking about people who are bigger visioning. These are people who started by looking at the end result, instead of asking themselves what they can do today. While we’re definitely not advocating for crime, we totally believe that there’s great benefit to be had when you consider the big picture of your business! Legacy planning doesn’t mean you’re not invested in your business today; it just means you’re building with the future in mind, and that can only benefit you, both today AND in the long term.

We’ve seen people invest so much into their business only to realize that the success of their business rests solely on their ability to keep it afloat. Creating systems, training staff, and starting with the end in mind are all powerful tools to help your business to thrive even once you have made your exit. We’re in the business of helping you to make the changes you need to make to create a sustainable business plan that will enable you to thrive today, and to continue to flourish after you eventually leave! So, tune in today to find out more about creating a retirement plan for your business!

As owners and CEOs, we’ve made plenty of mistakes, but we’ve also learned a lot from them. In today’s episode, we discuss some of the mistakes we’ve made, as well as the errors we’ve seen TONS of CEOs make over the years. So, if you recognize any of these in yourself, don’t worry, you’re in good company! Tuning in, you’ll hear us break down the 7 most prominent red flags and toxic behaviors that continue to happen in business. Learn how to recognize them, why they happen, and the tiny course corrections you can make to solve them.

The things that we are pointing out today are based on specific lessons we’ve observed throughout our careers. We’ve seen these errors play out in various ways, from friends who have needed to course-correct, to mistakes that we have inadvertently made in our own business. We’re taking this as an opportunity to share our knowledge so that you can become aware of these potential pitfalls and hopefully skip them altogether!

Are you ready for even more content? Bite sized videos, lessons, tutorials? We can’t believe it’s taken us this long, but we finally have a TikTok account! If you are a business owner looking for marketing tips, Canva tips, Dubsado tips, client-based tips, and everything in between, we are sharing everything there. That’s just a side note, our episode today is all about the difference between working in your business and working on your business. We’ve gone through many different seasons together, in life and in business, and in our usual style, we’re going to be spilling all the beans for you today!

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you might be under the impression that the hosts get along just fine. You’re right! When there are just two people, conflict is a lot less complicated, and a lot easier to resolve. Around two weeks into having a bigger team, we noticed that everyone would look to us for the answers, never contesting our conclusions. Different perspectives, backgrounds and insights all help us to make better decisions as a company. Abagail and Emylee want to make it really clear that not only do they not want to make all the decisions, but they actually believe that would be a really bad idea! That’s where conflict is necessary for the business to grow and thrive.

There’s never a good time to make radical changes and you can always find a reason not to do something. But we’ve learned from experience that there is so much to be gained from pursuing opportunities, even under adverse circumstances. One of the things that inhibit us from pursuing growth and opportunities is the feeling that we wouldn’t be able to cope with these new changes in a healthy and sustainable way. We often feel this because we compare ourselves to others. But the truth is that you can never know the full story of someone’s success. You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes or how their life really looks.

One of the biggest things we’ve learned from building our business is the importance of a supportive team and designing a business that is flexible enough to accommodate you during the different seasons of your life. We discuss some of the difficult circumstances we’ve been in while building our business and how it motivated us to build a business that could adapt to our needs. We also share our advice and insights on how to change your mindset and start pursuing radical change. So make sure you tune in to hear how we’ve adapted to our circumstances and how we’re helping others do the same!