On the Strategy Hour Podcast today, we are joined by the wonderful and amazing Rachel Green! She is one of the first people we connected with when we were starting out in the online business world. She has been in business for the last seven years, helping hundreds of businesses grow and succeed. As a brand strategist, designer and educator, Rachel has generated over 5 million dollars in sales for her clients and her focus on empowering female business owners is truly inspiring!

In this episode, we are breaking down what a brand strategy is, why it is important to start there and the questions that you need to ask when figuring this all out. Rachel offers some great thoughts to work through in order to help you make sure your story and brand are pushing you forward. She is all about progression, not just pretty branding and logos! We really respect Rachel's perspective on the strategic part of branding and we know you will all find it very useful. So buckle up and let's get into some strategy!

In the creative entrepreneur world, there are so many talents and you guys are doing great! But the one thing we’re seeing, and we’ve done the same thing, is that design work sometimes falls a little short. You might be a photographer, fine artist or wedding planner but do not necessarily have the expertise when it comes to your branding — that’s a set of skills entirely on its own. It could be an email header, a social media announcement or an infographic you need to whip up, and it’s not as easy as it looks. Graphic designers are trained to know what works and have a sharp eye to identify off-balance designs, but we regular folk don’t have that same skill. 

So, today Emylee gets to direct questions at Abagail who, as you all know, is a kick-ass designer. Wearing her designer hat, she will advise you about representing your brand in the most professional manner even though you lack professional skills. As much as we focus on teaching you guys about increasing profit, the way you show your brand to the world can be a make or break aspect. The bottom line is this: when you use the same styles, colors and fonts consistently, you become recognized as a brand, and that is your goal. 

This week on the Strategy Hour, we welcome a great friend of ours. Alexis Teichmiller is here on the show for the first time, which is kind of weird and surprising! We have known each other for over 3 years and we are super happy to have her, finally! Alexis is currently in Texas, although Illinois is definitely her home, and she works at ConvertKit where she creates, explores and inspires entrepreneurs through her position as the manager of ConvertKit's affiliate program. She loves building relationships with influential creators and got in the game as an online entrepreneur and blogger herself! So she knows the game and its frustrations. She wants to help bloggers find the right fit at ConvertKit and how they can be more human in the communication and branding!

In this episode, Alexis gives us some great tangible action steps. The script she offers can easily be used to do what she does and we guarantee you will see some great results! We can all improve our communication with all those who are close to us; this means partners, friends, family and those we work with. Alexis also shares two amazing tactics that ConvertKit has adopted as a company which are a bit scary but pretty revolutionary! There are a bunch of cool takeaways for your business, as well as some book and podcast recommendations that we know y'all are going to love! We are so excited to be talking about the human element to business and how you can show up as vulnerable, relatable, real and strong all at the same time!

Ya’ll know we’re on a mission to turn you into a full-time creative entrepreneur who earns a sustainable income from your passion. Because we’ve been on this journey ourselves for the past four years and have helped thousands of people through it, we have seen and heard most, if not all, of the mistakes in the book. While we’ve spoken a great deal about getting your perfectionist or overachieving mindset right, that alone won’t help you to succeed. On a practical level, you need to stop making crucial mistakes, including focusing too heavily on the appearance of your brand, thinking that your audience is a bunch of strangers and convincing yourself that gadgets and systems will get you to where you want to be. Today we unpack each of these common mistakes, so get your notebook and listen up! 

Today on The Strategy Hour we are so happy to be joined by our friend Jill Stanton! Jill is the co-founder of Screw the 9 to 5, where she helps ambitious entrepreneurs quit their day jobs and live out their business dreams. They also have a very popular podcast and through all this work has inspired tens of thousands of people to build thriving businesses and live lives full of meaning and purpose. You can see why we love Jill! This is such a fun conversation, in which we focus on what it means to hire for growth instead of filling spaces. There is a big difference between building a team that actually helps you make more money and just getting bigger. It is such an opportune time to talk to Jill about this as she and her husband have just implemented these changes themselves within the last year! So the results are not all in yet, but it is looking good so far.

No matter how big or small your business is, this episode has lessons for you, many of which can be implemented from day one in order to set yourself up for success. As many of you will have noticed we are getting into the habit of emphasizing profit above all else and this is something we have in common with Jill! We are just so excited to have someone with this much experience in the online business world to share their genius with you. We have so much respect for Jill and Screw the 9 to 5 as she has learned so many lessons and we can all be really grateful that she is here to share these us!

It’s time for another profit report! These are not an excuse to talk about our business – we truly want to arm you with helpful information that you can apply to your business as a full-time creative entrepreneur. Ups and downs are a natural part of any business, so we want to give you a glimpse into our month-to-month profit not so that you might compare your business to ours, but learn from our mistakes and find your own rhythm. We aim for a 30% profit and share what all our expenses are each month and the different sources of income over that period so you get all the details. Today you’ll learn what profit means to us, how our summit sales performed, why you must get hooked up with sponsors, the ins and outs of payment plans, and more! 

Joining us for Strategy Hour today is networking ninja, Cassandra Thompson, who helps businesses extend their network through LinkedIn! But before you think that LinkedIn is only for professional or corporate folks and therefore not applicable to creative entrepreneurs like us, think again. Illustrators, jewelry designers, and service-based providers can all benefit greatly from a LinkedIn presence, and in this episode, Cassandra gives us the step-by-step of setting up a profile, an explanation of how exactly it works and she shares loads of strategies for getting the absolute maximum out of this platform. 

We have to be honest, we too neglected LinkedIn because we thought that it wasn’t really a space for creatives to connect, but after a debate with Cassandra, we have done a 180 — and we’re pretty sure you will too after listening to what she has to say. Be sure to stay tuned in until the end because we are going to give you a 30-day LinkedIn challenge that we’d love for you to participate in! 

We cannot believe we are about to enter into a new decade! It's crazy but it's true, so get ready! This is a bit of an unplanned episode, which is what makes it special. We want to take this chance to share our planning around the new year with all of you, and exactly what we are thinking about accomplishing for our business in 2020. 

This chat will be the build-up to our end of year meetings around wrapping up and looking ahead. Just think of it as an unofficial look inside our minds as we close out another year at Boss Project and The Strategy Hour! So many businesses do not make it past the fifth year and we do not aim to add to this statistic! So feel free to drop in and eavesdrop on a typical meeting between us as we voice our thoughts and ideas going into the last part of 2019!

Our guest on the show today is Abbey Ashley, the founder of The Virtual Savvy! After running her own successful VA business for a few years, she has gone on to help other aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. We get to pick her brain today, and the reason we’re so excited is that she has an amazing business philosophy which involves keeping things simple while still making a major impact! She has perfected the art of doubling down on the areas that work and remaining laser-focused on those rather than getting distracted. 

In this episode, you’ll learn about her launch game plans as well as how she deals with Black Fridays, teaching us how to set ourselves up for a booming year ahead. You’ll be thrilled to know that Abbey will also be a speaker at our upcoming Boss Project Summit, another great reason to sign up and get your pass! 

Do you want to increase your sales? Of course, you do, we all do! There are so many strategies out there on how to do this and today we are picking out four that we use and that have been highly effective for us! We hope that sharing this with you will help you decide which strategies are best for you and your hustle. When we speak about our work we are referring to Boss Project, our main thing and then each of our own side gigs. Some of the strategies have worked better in different places but we will be unpacking all of that, do not worry!

The cool thing is you get to try these out for yourself and see which suits you. We want you to think about which fits with your goals and lifestyle, as well as its conversion efficacy. These are the most important metrics for you to keep an eye on while testing things out. Don't forget to keep the conversation going over on Instagram, you know we love to hear from you, so hit us up with any thoughts or questions!

Welcome back to the show all you lovely listeners! Today we have a great guest who we cannot wait to share with you. Taylor Slango is an online business coach who helps women looking to grow their empire without compromising the things that are important to them! Her focus is on helping clients align their energy and strategy, in order to have more fun, make more money and ultimately make more sales! She started her business just one year ago and has since scaled to six figures and managed to leave her 9 to 5 in under 12 months. Impressive, right? This path is exactly what we will be talking about today!

We are sure you all have a million questions around this transition. What it looks like, what to watch out for, how to know you're ready, the mindset to aim for and so on. Do not fear, we cover it all! We think the fact that Taylor is so fresh into this journey herself makes this an amazing opportunity to get her perspective! Taylor will also be at our upcoming summit, which we hope all of you have your free tickets for and if you do not yet, go get them! Her presentation is titled, 'How to Plan Your Next Sold Out Launch Without Stress, Overwhelm or Burnout'. This fits perfectly into today's conversation and we think you all need to hear it, so join us as we dive in!

Our whole mission is to help you transform your passion into a full-time business that provides you with a sustainable income, while also giving you the freedom to make your own rules. But becoming a creative entrepreneur comes with its own obstacles, and today we talk about the three-level model that we use to help our audience better understand business and where they are at in the process. The first tier of the model has you stuck in the idea phase, which often involves redesigning your brand, changing your website and trying to get all the cosmetic aspects perfect. The problem is, however, that you never move on to the implementation stage. 

When you are on the second level, you have started implementing your ideas and have made a few sales, but here you might also get trapped. There is a temptation to try several ideas at once and you come up with many tools and programs to help you grow. But the truth is, if you want to get to that third level, you need to simplify by choosing to focus on only one or two things, and then to carefully measure their results. Remember to sign up for our upcoming webinar where you’ll learn a whole lot more, including our business philosophy, the most common mistakes creative entrepreneurs are making and how to get past yourself! 

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!