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If you run a business online, then this is the show for you. Listen in as your host, Abagail Pumphrey delivers semi-ranty business strategies touching on everything from building a profitable offer to scaling sustainably to growing an ethical culture and everything in between.
top 10 business podcast | 4 Million+ downloads | 750+ episodes
Meet Your Host
Semi-ranty business strategies for successful small business owners.
Hey, it’s your host, Abagail Pumphrey. And I’m on a personal mission to help more small business owners become financially free.
I like to nerd out on all things business, marketing, and most definitely the numbers. I’m talking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a 7-figure online business.
I like to share it all and no conversation is off the table. We talk actionable strategies, biz challenges, and all the things life throws your way - grief, anxiety, loss, and resilience are all topics you’ll find here.
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The 4 Things a Service Provider Must Get Right: Part Four Build the Team to Help You Scale
Let’s dive into our fourth and final part of the epic series that is absolutely going to transform your life and your business! Today, we fill you in on a few critical insights into building the perfect team to help you scale. We’ve saved this one for last because, without creating structure, you can’t start building a team. But once you’re ready, you’ll find it to be an incredibly powerful tool to take you to the next level (if you get it right!) If you’ve skipped a few steps and already have a team of employees, never fear, it’s never too late to improve upon your current systems. Not every piece has to be perfect but when it comes to hiring; the more you know, the more equipped you’ll be to face whatever comes your way. And that’s what we’re here for! In this episode, you'll learn all about hiring for attitude, designing a well-integrated employee system, defining your priorities and hiring accordingly, refining your team, productizing your offer, and so much more! You won’t want to miss this one.
What Does Scaling Mean to You? Here's What You Need to Do Before Going Into a Growth Phase
Today we are going to have a fabulous conversation! When working with our current clients inside The Incubator we always talk about levers. What lever do you need to pull in order to get the result that you want? There aren’t actually that many levers that you have the option of pulling but people like to complicate things. We are here to simplify them for you! Sometimes the things that people think they need to do to scale and grow are actually just the opposite of what they should be doing.
This conversation is all about what you should be thinking about before you start scaling. We want to give you insights into what scaling looks like in reality, so that you can decide if scaling your business really is something you want to do at this current stage of your journey.
What to Do When You Hit a Brick Wall of Indecision When Scaling Your Service Based Business
A common thread that we’ve been noticing is that so many business owners we deal with have excelled in most facets of their life for a long time, but then all of a sudden they’ve hit a wall which has made them start to second guess everything they’ve done in the past, including their ability to be a business owner going forward.
When you get to the point where you realize you are working hard and not reaping the rewards that would make it worth it and you’re feeling stuck about how to change that, we have the solution: The Incubator! When you’re deeply involved in something, it can be really difficult to understand how you can tweak it to make it work better for you. We can provide you with that perspective.
Incubator Client Strategy Breakdown: Bonnie Hit $30k Months & Took a 10 Day Vacay 5 Months Into the Incubator Program
Most of us have a set of preconceived notions about what it takes to grow and scale our businesses. We’re often convinced that in order to make more money we need more clients, which means we need to grow our team. But we can’t grow our team until we have more money. The situation can feel impossible and even send you on a doom-spiral of dread. But it doesn’t need to be this way! Sometimes all you need is a new perspective and a gentle nudge in the right direction. In today’s episode, we share the incredible story of our wonderful client, Bonnie.
We unpack how the Incubator Program helped her understand her business, readjust her pricing structure, and transform her life and her company in the process. We take a deep dive into the preconceived notions around growing and scaling your business, and how small shifts can bring about dramatic changes. Discover how Bonnie managed to double her revenue in five months, find ease within her business, and take a 10-day vacation in Costa Rica, without a laptop! We’ve loved seeing the Incubator community grow, and it’s so rewarding to see members flourish, share, and support one another. Tune in to learn more about the program and how it helped Bonnie transform her business!
What You Need to Be Ready to Admit if You've Hit a Ceiling In Your Business
Today, we want to talk about what happens when you grow your own business only to wake up one day and realize that, although you’ve grown out of the ‘wearing all the hats’ phase and you’ve got all the right people and systems in place, everything still seems to be falling apart. You might still feel like you’re doing 75 million things and you have no idea how you got here or what you’re doing and you feel deeply ashamed that you don’t know how to fix it.
We’ve met so many self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who are the CEOs of their businesses, yet they don’t really know what it means to fully sit in that seat, and part of the confusion lies in the fact that they are incredibly talented. We’re talking about people who have typically excelled in everything they’ve ever done! They’re so used to being the star and, suddenly, they feel like they’ve hit a ceiling. This moment of reckoning is inevitable, and it hits everyone at a different point. For some, it'll feel like an income ceiling and, for others, it might feel entirely time-related. For some of you, it might be a recognition that you need more help but you can’t afford it, or that you’re mismanaging the help you do have, have the wrong help, or you don’t know how to identify the help you need.
Strategically Choosing to Build a Business with Less Profits in Pursuit of Financial Freedom
Let’s start by saying it’s okay to be wherever you find yourself in your financial journey! This one is for those of us who are working our faces off on the back end, and not seeing this translate to profits. Maybe you’ve already identified your first baby step to start working towards your goal. Today’s episode is about identifying your goals and putting them into action. We’re here to equip you with the tools you need to put those steps into action with a long-term goal in mind, from identifying what you want out of it, to learning what you need to learn to grow a healthy business.
The Shift that Doubled Our Business in 4 Months
We have to get creative about how we manage human resources within a completely digital team that is just growing and growing! It’s been the wildest 6 months. You will go through seasons of your business where you are very sure about what you want and what you don’t want, but remember that you have the right to change your mind. What we wanted two years ago is not at all what we want right now, but we’re not mad about it. When you change your mind about something, it’s probably because you have learned more, or have more confidence or more skills in that particular area, and that is nothing to feel bad about! This episode is all about the mindset shift which led us to change something in our business that caused an unprecedented level of growth!
Leaving Retail to Pursue Her Creative Business Full-Time with Krystina Benedetti of The Messy Cookie
Today on the podcast we have Krystina Benedetti of The Messy Cookie. She is a lifelong entrepreneur who has grown her love of baking into a business and started spreading her joy through COVID. She has left her full-time job and has built an online business that offers virtual Cookie Ice Nights and she is also making all these amazing custom cookies. We love this girl, she is so amazing!
Krystina is soon to be a Strategy Academy alumni! She is not even a year through our course, hasn’t even celebrated her first birthday with us, and has already done super amazing things in her business, like putting in her notice to leave her retail job to pursue her cookie business full-time. We break down everything that she has gone through in the last eight months that has led up to the moment where she felt comfortable and ready to leave her job. We talk about what she had logistically prepared for, how she got there mentally, what investing in her business looked like to her, and how she tackled the program and made the most of it to see the most traction. If you are interested in the Strategy Academy, we have a free training video that you can watch here.
Keeping Your Business Smaller on Purpose without Sacrificing Profit
A couple of episodes ago, we teased at the end that we were already going into what could be a whole other conversation. This is that conversation. We are going to be sharing some tidbits we have learned and have deliberately decided to do or not to do in Boss Project, and within our side businesses, to seek growth and to keep our business and our companies in the range we want them to be. This is based on what we do and don’t want to do in that job. We know this sounds confusing but stick with us, and we will break it all down. We really want you to go and listen to episode 512 because at the end we start this conversation, so it might make a little more sense to listen to that one first.
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I’m so thrilled to interview two guests who are not only making waves in the coffee industry but also making a profound difference in the fight against human trafficking. Jenny Barber is the co-founder of Talitha Coffee Roasters, and her vision is to use the coffee industry as a platform to provide survivors with jobs, training, housing, healthcare, and counseling. Joining her is Mark Becklund, Vice President of Product and Growth at Talitha Coffee Roasters, who plays a key role in ensuring that every cup of coffee tastes great and contributes to the company’s true mission and goal.