We see so many business owners who think that the answer to scaling is more about cash than relationships. Yes, cash is a component but it is not the primary problem! First of all, we want to talk about growth versus scaling. They are used interchangeably in this industry but they simply are not the same. Growth is primarily centered around financial and revenue changes in your business and scaling is more about the actual behind-the-scenes operations of how your business is pieced together.

Does your input feel aligned with your output? If you are billing hourly, chances are things are beginning to feel unbalanced. In this episode, we fill you in on how we can help you make the transition from hourly billing to value-based pricing, creating a more predictable business and recurring income. Today, we want to introduce you to new pricing models and provide insight into how to prepare your clients for the changes.

Today we’re talking about pricing! We have been discussing pricing for creative small business owners since the beginning. This is our happy place! We have a new version of this conversation today and are excited to share it with you. Let’s face it, the market is just totally weird right now. Business owners approach us often, asking for advice about whether to pivot or start over. And 90% of the time, we’re Team Pivot, as long as you ensure that your pivot aligns with what the market sees as essential. You’ve got to meet your clients or prospective clients where they’re at. So what does it take to close different kinds of clients at different price points?

Maybe you’re a one-woman show. Maybe you’ve hired a part-time employee or a contractor or two. You have probably seen significantly high profits in your first few years. Now, you’re entering years three, four, five, and beyond, and you want to pay yourself more, hire more, or have other expenses you want to reallocate funds to. You’re so married to your high profits, that you will create goals for yourself to do anything you can to maintain those profits while being able to spend more money. We really want you to give yourself a bit of a break here! And that’s exactly what we hope to empower you to do through this episode.

If you follow us on social media, you might have seen that we have been on quite the podcast roadshow! One theme that kept coming out of our conversations is the things that service providers need to think about before scaling. We realized we need to take a step back and talk about it: what is scaling actually?

A lot of business owners misconstrue scaling and growth. Today, we want to talk about the actual definitions of these two processes, and how you can apply them in your business. You can have one without the other. You can have both. You can have neither. What does that really look like, intentionally, in your business? Tune in to find out!

We’re in the final quarter of the year and it’s the perfect time to hunker down, focus, and refine. This is the season to investigate what’s working in your business and what’s not so you can make strategic and educated improvements going into the next year. In preparation, you’re going to need to start collecting data in order to identify your greatest areas of opportunity and gauge where to place your focus.

This past week, we walked through a quarterly optimization training with our clients, and today, we want to share some of the conversations we had there so you can learn from them and apply the takeaways to your own business. In this episode, you’ll find out how one of our clients increased her close rate by 40% and where she discovered she needed to place her focus once her sales process was in order.

Tune in to find out which metrics are worth analyzing, how to pitch up to a planning session, and much more, including some tangible tips for improving your sales strategy!

Today, we want to share with you some behind-the-scenes live action of the “tweaking and repeating” that we do whenever we implement something new in our business. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve probably heard us talk about this concept before. As a refresher, “tweaking and repeating” means to take a particular action in your business for a set amount of time (at least 30 days) and then go back and reflect. Think about how it went, how it made you feel, and if there are any opportunities for you to pivot and improve what you’ve tried.

Listen in as we discuss a rundown of our “tweak and repeat” process on something that we started exactly 30 days ago. We’re going to go through the results, the things we want to keep doing, and the things we want to change. We’re showing you an example, so that you can go through the same assessment process in your own business.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.