Today we are so lucky to host Joelle Elizabeth on the show! Joelle is a boudoir photographer and marketing strategist for other ambitious photographers and she is here to talk about growing a following and creating engagement on Instagram! 

Remember when we almost deleted out Instagram account? Well, Joelle was one of the amazing people who reached out to us and offered some great alternative ideas and we are eternally thankful to Joelle for the great value she has provided to us! Join us today as we get into how to double down on what you have going on and boost your status on the 'gram to get that business pumping!

Today we’re sharing with you our profit report for September. This is such a great opportunity for us to reflect on our business while also giving you a sneak-peek into how this might be applicable to yours. And before you think this is going to be boring – it’s not a traditional income report and we’re not giving you every single figure because it leads to a lot of unnecessary comparisons, disrupting the possibility of learning something. 

In this episode, we’re going to go over what worked and what didn’t, where the money came from and how it left, and what profit was left right at the end. Comparing September’s report with the previous month’s will also be helpful in understanding the unpredictable nature of business and will be a good starting point for getting some new strategies in place.

Today we have our first roundtable discussion of sorts! We are joined by Parker Stevenson of Evolved Finance and Amy Northard of Amy Northard CPA! Both of our guests are people we work with and they are here to tell us about their experiences scaling service-based business scaling service-based businesses. Parker is our resident bookkeeping and financial guru and Amy is our tax accountant and so much more! Now you might be thinking that these topics might not make for the most interesting episode but we promise this is going to be super fun and not at all dull!

Both of our guests spoke at our recent summit about growing a team and productizing your services and we wanted to pick their brains just a little bit more on the subject! So they are here to give you some suggestions on realistic scaling and how they have found it possible to move things upward in their service-based businesses. So if you love client work but also want to keep growing and cannot quite imagine how it might all work, this is the episode for you!

Welcome to the Strategy Hour, everybody! Today's show is all about our upcoming summit! Yup, it is our fourth summit, can you believe it? This time we are focused on helping you make the most of the end of the year and soaring into the new year like a rockstar! It is going to be so awesome and we can hardly contain our excitement about it! There is so much potential for the last part of the year and we probably do not need to tell you that Q4 is a really big one for small business owners. 

Our summit is going to set you up to tie a big, beautiful bow around 2019 and kickstart the new year on the right foot with the best energy. It can also be used as a great way to take stock and move into the next phase based on the lessons available. We wanted to bring you a complete package that offers a selection of things you need for now, the end of the year and the new year too! These time-sensitive strategies and ideas will cover Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the holiday season, planning, questions and setting goals. We want to help you commit to the right things and give you the right stuff to implement in your business for the better. Join us as we give a preview of what to expect!

Today we are super glad to welcome business and NLP coach Jen Casey to the show! Hailing from NYC, Jen is focused on helping coaches sell profitable group programs by incorporating psychology into their sales techniques. She also has her own podcast called the Inner Boss Podcast, so make sure to check that out! As you probably know, here at The Strategy Hour we are pretty obsessed with psychology! Jen is all about perfecting sales language for webinars and in-person meetings and uses her techniques to change deep-rooted beliefs and alter the neural pathways that hold us back. 

She has action steps for repeating patterns that create new pathways and habits that are more in line with our goals and ambitions and by learning these ideas you can help your customers do the same thing! This is a long episode with lots to think about, so you might want to grab a notepad to take part in the exercises! Make sure to share your experiences on our Instagram, we love hearing from you!

We did a survey to find out where you guys are currently at in your businesses, the areas you are struggling in, what kind of profits you are making and where we could come in and offer some guidance. What we’ve noticed from the feedback and about the industry in general is that there is an epidemic going on – one that involves the side hustle! So, we thought we better address this topic, not to pigeonhole you, but rather to give you the facts we’ve gathered. 

The survey is technically still live, and the report is automatically updated, so you can keep checking in to see how the data shifts. In our email correspondence to you, we will link the survey and the results page for you to access easily. What do other similar surveys say? Where are most of you in your businesses? What kind of money are you making or hoping to make? We get into all of these questions, revealing some super surprising results! Join us to find out what your sisters said about their side hustles!  

Today on the podcast we have Braden Drake, a California licensed attorney with a master’s degree in tax law, joining our conversation. He runs an education company that teaches other small business owners how to get the legal and tax stuff in order to ultimately unf*ck your business framework! He’s a pro at sorting out all the accounting and tax mess we make in our businesses, all those things that are totally befuddling to most of us! 

You’ll be happy to hear that he dishes out a lot of great strategy regarding lawyer-y things, and towards the end of our talk, he also gives away an awesome resource. If you need to do some damage control or brush up on your know-how around the sticky issues like choosing the right entity, paying quarterly taxes and avoiding Frankenstein contracts, be sure to tune in! 

We’ve heard from a lot of people that going from contractors to employees is complicated, expensive and overwhelming, so for a long time, we avoided going down that road. But then we started looking into it and considered all the potentially good stuff about having employees, such as having more control over how they spend their time and when they work. On today’s episode, we want to talk about all the things to think about before hiring an employee, because the truth is, it is very different and a much bigger responsibility. 

There are pros and cons to both, though, and that is why we share with you our experience over the last few years, so that you can be prepared for whichever scenario you choose. It’s all about looking at your business and figuring out whether you are in a financial position to take on a full time employee and whether you are prepared to deal with the positives and negatives of each option. Join us for everything you need to know about the people who do work for your business! 

Income reports can be super distracting and set you on a road of comparison, so instead of focusing on the exact dollars, it might be more useful to look at the profit and give you a breakdown of the biggest sources of income as well as the major expenses. Therefore, we are calling it a profit report and we want to ask all of you, even before we start, to DM us feedback – whether this format worked and helped you in your business. 

In this episode, you will hear more about our thought processes around profits and expenses, but it is important to keep in mind that there are many different ways in which to approach this, so we are not suggesting that you replicate exactly what we do. For the sake of transparency, we also want to let all of you in instead of just talking about the topic. We believe sharing the truth about our business will be of much greater value to you than simply giving you a blueprint for what it should look like. The focus should be profit and figuring out what your goal is in this regard is more important than being able to say you are a six-figure business. We’re baring it all today, so don’t miss out! 

Today we are talking about what it means to become a full-time creative entrepreneur. Scary thought? Maybe, but we’re here to tell you that starting your own business does not have to be the insurmountable project it is often believed to be. Yes, it can be riskier and less stable in many ways, but what we are going to tell you today is really going to surprise you, and hopefully encourage you to take the leap of faith toward becoming a full-time creative entrepreneur. 

Ultimately, our goal is for you to create for yourself not only a job but a sustainable income so that you can provide for your family while also enjoying the lifestyle you want. We share with you a bit of background about our early lives and how it shaped our desire to work for ourselves and talk about the different pressures and circumstances that influence your perspective on entrepreneurship. We also talk about getting to your success point ASAP, what you can expect in terms of free time as an entrepreneur and why this is all 100% within your reach. So, get ready for some encouraging insight!  

Today on the show we are so happy to welcome back Christine McAlister! If you are not already familiar with Christine, she helps high achievers replace income and continue to grow their businesses and be generally awesome! This episode is a look behind the scenes on coaching, group courses and one-on-one programs. We want to help you decide which might be the right one for you at any particular time. All of us on the show believe that different times require specific approaches, the trick is to know what you need and then follow that path to success! 

In order to do this, you need to establish expectations and clarify your goals. This relaxed conversation will feature all of us sharing our opinions and experiences in this realm, seeing our students progress and helping you figure out what is the best fit for you. We are going to hash it all out for you listening, so sit tight and do not forget to hit up our Instagram and DM us any thoughts, questions or reflection you might have!

Today on the podcast we are joined by the fabulous Lauren Goldstein, CEO and founder of Golden Key Partnership, a strategy consulting firm that helps businesses to scale smart in order to be more sustainable. There is tons to learn from her seasoned and scientifically-backed approach, so today she will be dishing out straightforward facts, particularly as it pertains to productivity and how it relates to your profit. She shares time-wasting tactics that many of us are skilled at and pulls up some new studies that illuminate what distraction does to our day. A question we often think about is what we need to be doing to move our business forward, and it can be stressful to decide which of the dozens of things to take or leave. Lauren weighs in on the matter with some simple, no-nonsense advice. 

Being overwhelmed with tasks can lead to decision fatigue, which prevents us from effectively prioritizing tasks that are most important. Productivity and processes can make or break an entrepreneur because of burnout or be the demise of a business due to revenue and profit leaks. According to the IDC, companies lose 20 to 30% in revenue every year as a result of inefficiencies. This is a staggering statistic! Therefore, we bring you this episode that is guaranteed to help you improve your productivity, so be sure to join in the conversation! 

Welcome back to the show, everybody! Today we are going to be letting you even further into our business lives! As we continue to grow we are constantly asking ourselves, "What is the content that people want to hear about?" This goal of keeping you entertained, educated, and engaged is very important to us and we have always loved sharing our lives and work with all of you. When we started out, everything we did was fun, fresh, and engaging and it was easy to share this with our listeners in a natural way. As we have grown, things have changed and we have been more considerate in our choices but we want to carry on sharing stuff with you that is exciting, new, and informative. It has always been our best thing, being able to share something about a problem we solved or a strategy we discovered. 

As we enter year four of our biz we have to continue to look for these opportunities when we have had a different reality from where started out and many of our listeners. We want to help you now and set you up for success in the future! We have a feeling there may be some inaccurate perceptions out there of what is happening in our business. You are welcome to DM us on Instagram with your thoughts but we sense people find us less relatable than when we started out and were smaller. There have been challenges in continually connecting with our audience as our situation has changed, our team has grown and so on, but we want, more than anything, to stay relatable to all of you! We actually think we are probably in more similar situations to a lot of you than you may think! All this to say, we have resolved to let you in on some of this and share more of what is going on in our current lives than we have been!

Would you ever consider deleting your Instagram account if you had nearly 40,000 followers? Businesses go through different seasons and for a long time we had not focused on Instagram because we were otherwise occupied. But for some reason, our account remained semi-active and we were still slowly but surely gaining followers, even though we only really posted about the podcast and random bits in between. But the engagement was poor, so much so that we no longer saw the need to post at all or to have the account, and this set us on a rollercoaster of a journey of trying to figure out whether we should delete our existing account and start all over again. This might sound crazy, but we had what we believed were legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, and our intentions were so good! 

We were absolutely convinced that this was the way to go, that is, until a comment or two from our audience and friends threw a wrench in the works and forced us back to square one. This was an amazing educational process that we came though as we learned a ton about ourselves, our business and what our approach to our followers should be. If you are thinking about deleting your account and starting off with a clean slate or just looking to grow your Instagram engagement, this episode is perfect for you, so be sure to listen in! 

Today we talk about a fascinating topic, one that affects every single one of you in one way or another in your business. When we think about marketing, we tend to think about psychology in general and the things that inherently appeal to all people. But, there is a better way to approach marketing and it pertains to the different generations. Ever thought about why people of different ages think and behave so differently from one another and often bump heads, whether in families or in business? What we discuss today will shed a whole lot of light on this subject. We compare and contrast the generations, from the traditionalists up to Gen Z and everything in between. 

Each new generation is constructed in a unique way with different things that impact how they view the world and what kinds of consumers they are. For this reason, marketing efforts should be adjusted accordingly to ensure that you speak to the needs of the generation you are targeting, and so you can better understand why certain initiatives will be more effective than others. We have relied heavily on the research of the amazing Jason Dorsey for this episode, so a lot of the information provided here is from his work on the topic. Definitely check out his website if you want to find out more. Jason also speaks about a very interesting new thought about millennials, one which we will get into on this episode, so be sure to tune in!