In today’s episode, we welcome Mary Shores. Mary is the international bestselling author of Conscious Communications: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Harnessing the Power of Your Words to Change Your Mind, Your Choices, and Your Life. As an author, speaker, entrepreneur and CEO, Mary teaches individuals and businesses to fearlessly create their own realities by using scientific methods and practical personal development.

Have you ever been stuck in a rut, found yourself overwhelmed with problems or drowning in negative self-talk? Well, Mary has a scientifically backed, five-step process to help get you from breakdown to breakthrough and today, she’ll be talking us through it. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the power words have in your life, Mary’s cleanse and clog formula, how to turn a possibility into a probability, make your problems smaller and come out on the bright side of life. If you’ve got some shit in your life, then you’ve got to listen to this episode!

Megan Auman is a designer, metalsmith, educator and entrepreneur who has built a multi-faceted business around her passion for art, commerce and visual content creation. AKA, she rocks Instagram and Pinterest! In addition to running her eponymous jewelry line, you’ll find her on Designing an MBA talking and teaching about the intersection of art and business.

In this episode, we will be looking at how to use Instagram and Pinterest to see a return on investment and grow your email list. We will even be getting some tips on what to do with New York Now, how to plan a holiday marketing strategy and why keeping it simple is key. So hold onto your panties! As a trained and practicing metalsmith, Megan is a great person to help those entrepreneurs who are specifically hand-makers trying to grow a handmade business. So jump in and take a listen!

Today on the podcast we welcome Meet Edgar Founder and CEO, Laura Roeder. Meet Edgar is a social media automation tool that makes sure your social media content gets posted to all the appropriate places. Often we are so afraid to repurpose or repost content more than once. But if you knew that your reach per post is often sitting around 5%, you might start to think a little differently! Meet Edgar helps small businesses and entrepreneurs reuse their best content to bring in a ton of views.

But we are not only talking about social media today; we are talking about how Laura bootstrapped her company, how she has developed a 100% remote team of 30 employees across the US, generated over seven thousand subscribers, is bringing in $4 million in annual revenue and how she has survived all of this with zero sales team. Oh, and all of this was in just three years. Today, we will be diving into all her juicy secrets, discussing the future of social media networks, and why we should be utilizing them while they are still free.

Boss babes, you are in for a treat today. We are doing what we normally do after a launch. We are giving you all the nitty gritty details you won’t hear anywhere else. You are going to hear about ad spend, what we did, what we didn’t do, how much we made, and all of what happened in our most recent launch, which happens to be an affiliate launch for someone else’s course (not even our own program), that we just wrapped up in July 2017. If you have no clue what we’re talking about, go back to some of our older podcasts and give them a listen.

After having so much success with FB Everything, we thought it would be beneficial for our audience to hear how we went about doing an affiliate launch. We spent money on marketing someone else’s program and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, so if you’re even a tiny bit curious, keep listening!

They call her The Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon, and yes, we have her on the show today. Tracey Osborne, CEO of Empowered Fempreneurs, is here! Tracey has had a decade-long career as a Virtual Assistant and grew her business from $15,000 to 6-figures in only two years. During that time she has authored and co-authored three books, her latest being, Becoming A VA.

Inside this episode, we go over the exact systems that Tracey used to get her business off the ground, from the very beginning. We look at how she was able to leave her full-time job in 60 days, start her VA business and get off to the races in no time. We also talk about how Tracey was able to build relationships and eventually build an agency model where she brought on other VA’s inside her own business so she could grow and scale. Keep listening to learn more.

On today’s show we literally take you behind the scenes of the biggest launch of our careers! After two years of hard work and thinking about what we could offer the world that’s really going to change the landscape for creative entrepreneurs, we launched The Strategy Academy. We don’t think you guys realize the amount of excitement that we have to bring you this episode. Not only are we excited because it means the launch is over and we can finally breathe, but we are also excited because it’s the biggest launch of our careers, ever! It also meant a lot of lessons learned, a lot of successful decisions, a few minor tweaks and pivots, and some crazy data and stats that absolutely blew our minds!

A lot of people plateau because they don’t know how to automate and they don’t know how to grow a team. So we took everything a step further in the Strategy Academy and really gave people like a full blown roadmap! The launch took off in June this year and had some unexpected highs, some surprising lows and some exciting turns! Today, we are giving you the launch breakdown 101. The data, the results and the digits — because y’all know we hold nothing back — of our most recent $94,936 Strategy Academy launch. Hear how we did it and how you can do it too!

You guys, today is kind of an incredible day. We are introducing you to our newest creation, The Strategy Academy. It’s our digital baby, the thing that we have been working on literally from day one. We wanted to create this new movement and program and opportunity for small business owners, specifically creative small business owners. The reactions have been amazing, the support, the cheerleading, everything around this program has just made our hearts go super warm and fuzzy.

Today, we’re going to introduce you to the Strategy Academy, we’re going to walk you through what’s inside, why it’s amazing and kind of explain more of the choose your own adventure that we have built inside this program. This will help make those decisions a little easier and really give you some guidance as to what you’re going to get out of the program and why we invested so much time and energy into it.

Word on the street is, you have some pretty bomb ideas but, for whatever reason, you just keep them in your pocket, you sit on them, you hold onto them, and you don’t launch them. What the heck? What are you waiting for, lady? There is a valuable opportunity there that can earn you some real cash dollar bills for your business. So many of you come to us saying that you have this amazing dreamy idea, but you are frozen, you are stuck, and you are on the fence. A lot of you live in Sitting-on-the-fence-ville, right? But the reality of it all is, it is not comfortable or really beneficial for anyone.

We want to help you to get into the launch mindset and so we have created the 5 Days to Launch Challenge to arm you with the strategies and the steps you need to get there. We have determined that launching something and launching it well really just comes down to five steps. That’s it. Five steps. You can do one step a day and at the end of five days, you will have launched a product and made actual money. So get ready to jump into your very own launch by signing up for the challenge today!

We are so excited today to have Johnny and Joanna on from Letterfolk Co on the show. They are amazing givers of knowledge and awesome business owners who make adorable felt and wood letter boards that you can put little quotes on and uniquely capture monthly milestones with. Bonus: they’re handmade in the United States! We reached out to them on a whim because they have such a beautiful Instagram and such an amazing business that we wanted to pick their brains, especially for you guys because they actually sell physical products. Not surprisingly, they have a ton of amazing nuggets of wisdom to share with you guys.

Over the last year and a half, Johnny and Joanna’s business has grown like gangbusters and in this episode we dive into the specifics about when they invested in branding, when they do stock versus custom packaging, what platforms they use, what software they’ve invested in, how they hired their first employee, and more. Plus, we get into all the decisions that went into the making of the company, specifically the mindset piece, which is probably the most important part! They are both so kind, so smart, and you are going to learn so much in this episode.

Today on the podcast we have Katie Hunt with us, and it is going to be an absolute showdown — tradeshow showdown! Katie knows all the secret stuff about this whole secret universe that they call “wholesale”. Now although neither of us live in this parallel universe, Katie definitely does, and she has a ton of knowledge to share with us. Katie has been wholesaling and dealing with the wholesale world since 2009 and has always had the entrepreneurial bug, even back in the day selling friendship bracelets to all her friends.

Katie shares how she first got started in the wholesaling industry, going from making wedding invitations and cards for all of her friends, to a full-blown Etsy shop of her own. She has spent the last 16 years coaching large corporations and entrepreneurs on marketing and business development strategies. Her strengths lie in connecting with people and bringing ideas to life – brainstorming, making plans and executing them. Katie has a passion for creating, a mind for business, and a strong desire to help others succeed. So if you want to soak up all her  knowledge, then you’d better listen in!

Ever wonder how to go about growing your business and which strategy to pursue? Maybe you feel stuck and you are at the breaking point where something’s got to give? Well, today on the podcast we jump into exactly how to scale and grow your team. We tackle all the questions you need to be asking yourself before you even decide whether a team is the right move for you. Because for some of you, a team might not be the answer; it just might be what you think is the answer.

We first discovered Jeff on Instagram. Jeff is a photographer who loves to take a lot of architectural images, and so, naturally, we fell in love with his work. Not long after, we discovered his wife, Kelly, and we just absolutely had to follow them both! We followed their work for a year and a half before reaching out to them, and it’s been such a fun journey getting know them on a more personal level, and getting the inside scoop on how their business actually runs.

If you know of Studio DIY, you know that they have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, and that their DIY blog is pretty outstanding. In our talk with them, we discover more about their journey, what the early days of Studio DIY looked like, how they built sponsorship and affiliate relationships, and how they decided what to charge for those sponsorships (everyone’s burning question!). They also share what it was like branching out and creating their own physical product line.

Since then, they’ve grown a lot and implemented tons of incredible strategies in their business to make it what it is today. So, if you are a DIY’er yourself, you absolutely have to give this one and listen!

We are super excited to bring our friend Amber Housley onto the podcast today. We had the opportunity to meet Amber last year at the Savvy Experience and it was so wonderful getting to know her, getting to hang out with her, and learning more about what she does. Because, if you all didn’t know, she does a lot!

Amber has her hands in a lot of creative businesses. She is rocking it at her own brand and along with that, she also has the Inspired Retreat, the Joyful Garden Planner, and her brand new course, Blooming Business Kits. In addition, she’s also the marketing director for Lara Casey Media, which means she’s involved in Southern Weddings, PowerSheets, and everything Lara Casey.

Together we dive into talking about taking a support role and what it’s like to not always play boss. We discuss the benefits, the challenges, what she’d love to change, and what it is truly like to resist a support role and then embrace it completely. We also talk a little bit about balance and what it means to run a lot of creative businesses and have your hands in a lot of different pots. Amber is an amazing example, role model, and a very humble human being, so you definitely have to listen in!

Today we’re getting real with blogging. Every time I say the word “blog” I can see the cringe on people’s faces (yes, even through the computer screen). We get it, for some, it isn’t your favorite thing. That is A-okay. But you can’t just assume you are going to escape it. Today, we are going to talk to you about why it is important, how it has been super incremental to our personal growth, and our business growth and some hints and tips for you to make it a bit easier on yourself so you can enjoy it a little bit more.

People get caught up on wanting to see quick results. Like anything else, they think blogging is the quick way to see financial gain. However, blogging is not a get rich quick scheme. Blogging is a totally different world than it was five or 10 years ago. It’s an entirely different strategy with an entirely different marketing game plan, and in order to get paid from your blog, you have to have a different mindset. You must get in the mindset that blogging is 100%, straight up, no joke a long-term game. So if you are looking for some guidance and motivation to grow your blog, then this is the episode for you! Are you ready?

Wondering about how to rock it in your product based business? Well, then this is the episode for you. We are so excited to have Emily Ley from The Simplified Planner on the podcast today. She brings a fresh perspective, shares some incredible nuggets of wisdom and really dives into her ever-evolving business. We’re going to answer some of y’alls biggest burning questions about product based businesses, how they run and how they work.

You are going to hear about blogging for a product based business, the honest truth about wholesale, cash flow, predicting inventory, and seeking grace not perfection. So get ready, we’re going to get started!