Today on the Strategy Hour podcast we have Kat Harris joining us. She is a Brooklyn-based online educator, digital content creator, co-founder of The Refined Woman, and the host of The Refined Collective podcast. Kat is also a photographer who has spent the last decade working from home—so she can teach us a thing or two about getting working from home right! After so many years of experience, she had tons of advice and shares her strategies for organizing your schedule to serve you. Because, for Kat, your time and energy matters and you should be spending it exactly like you want to while still getting the job done.

She talks about how she has adjusted her schedule, mindset, and expectations during the crisis to strike the balance between growing and giving yourself a lot of grace. This episode is full of practical advice everyone can implement on some level, according to your reality and set of priorities. Let’s jump in!

We have exciting news! Word on the street is that Emylee is trying something new—gasp! Because, as you may know, she isn’t stuck in her ways at all…But before she shares her news, we have to state upfront that Abagail is going to be fulfilling the role of devil’s advocate on today’s show, poking holes in Emylee’s gutsy decision to switch from Squarespace to Shopify. We’ve been using the former since 2014 and we’ve been incredibly loyal, building our entire business on this site. At one point we considered having the site customized because we thought we were getting too big for the platform, but we ended up proving that Squarespace really can work for large businesses. And we still love Squarespace!

But then Emylee started this whole product-based business venture and it’s been a learning experience par excellence: of course, it is completely different from running a service-based business like Boss Project. So, Emylee called Abagail a few days ago and let her in on the secret: she was rebuilding her website on a new platform—Shopify. Now she’s getting messages from friends saying, “Welcome to the club! You’re doing what every e-commerce person should be doing.” In this episode, Emylee is going to walk you through the reasons for her decision, the features she’s excited about and the ones she misses, who she thinks Squarespace is right for, and more. Be sure to listen in as the two of them hash it out!

Today, we have Amanda Boleyn back on the show! She is the founder of She Did It Her Way, where she coaches women how to quit their jobs, replace their income, and build an online business they love. In this episode, we are talking about the four steps she has developed that you can implement right now to start landing clients and offering your services!

We know that considering current circumstances these steps might need to be expedited a little bit and they could feel a little hurried and rushed, but the point is they work so implementing them effectively could be just what you need. So, today we are giving you a lot of ideas on who you can be reaching out to, how you can figure out what to offer, and how to actually market and get your product or service sold!

For those of you who don’t already know Emylee – welcome to her anxious life. She is the type of person who can tell you where every exit in a building is, or how to stop drop and roll in case of a fire, and where to hide just in case a tornado suddenly appears on route to the mall. In business, Emylee is the kind of person that likes to go through every single worst case scenario. She always has a back up plan… and a backup plan for the backup plan. Emylee is the queen of doing this and it turns out this can be a super helpful attribute to have in a business partnership.

This episode is about planning for the things you can never plan for. It’s about answering those difficult “What if” questions. It’s about securing your business for the future and the reassurance this brings to your life. For those of you who are single business owners, we’re not sure you’ve thought of planning for worst case scenarios and exactly how to do that. So in today’s episode, we’re going to be sharing our experiences and the reasons we have made planning for worst case scenarios an integral part of our overall business strategy. We discuss buy-sell agreements, the various insurance options you have, the tough questions you need to ask yourself today and how you can effectively plan for the worst, in the best kind of way. Take a listen!

Today on the podcast we have Courtney Chaal, the founder of The Rule Breaker’s Club where she teaches women to package and sell with brilliance and offers awesome products, and her work has been featured in Inc., Creative Live, and The Huffpost to name only a few. She is crazy-talented when it comes to messaging specifically, so this interview is right on time. We get that we shouldn’t necessarily be changing our offers or postpone our launches, but how do we talk differently about our services, so that it appeals to people at this moment?

What messaging do we need to tweak to make it relevant, and where is the balance between being empathetic and helpful versus making sales because we’ve got businesses to run? Courtney shares the top tips that she herself is implementing in her business, from getting your mindset right and brainstorming ideas, to asking your audience what they need and putting it all together in a project plan, so strap in and let’s dive in!

We dunno if y’all noticed, but March was weird. March was also hard, hurtful, and 7,000 times longer than January. That’s probably because March asked us to adjust to a new normal and we were still getting used to being home—all the time. And we’re not here to pretend like our situations are better or worse than anybody else’s because, like you, neither of us knew what was going to go down in 2020. What we do know is that this period will be a watershed in small business, the impact of which will likely be felt years from now.

While we don’t know how this will pan out, we can give you our March profit report and roll it out into a Q1 report in general for you guys to see how the first three months of the year went for us. You can always DM us if there is anything you want to know that we didn’t cover—we’re all here to learn together, right? In this episode, we tell you how each of our products fared, including the surprises and the disappointments we had and how we overcame certain obstacles. One thing is certain: tuning in to this episode will encourage you because we show you how reaching your goals is still possible!

On today’s show, we interview Melanie Fountain, a blog and Pinterest strategist who started her virtual assistant business a while ago and has since equipped herself in the area of all things Pinterest. We hopped on a call with her to chat about all the changes 2020 brought to the business landscape, and we were so blown away by her knowledge that we asked her to record an episode of The Strategy Hour with us. She talks about the behind-the-scenes strategies for getting your content discovered and seen by more people. Earlier this year, Pinterest underwent a shift toward different looking content but fortunately, it does not mean you have to go out and make a bunch of new content.

Melanie walks us through their adjusted policies and how you should adjust your approach, how Pinterest can work for product-based businesses, and what it means to be discoverable on the platform, including the ins and outs of hashtags, keywords, and descriptions. We adore Pinterest and have since its inception when it was all about planning dream weddings. In the early days, you saw more lifestyle content than business blogs, so using it for business purposes was still fairly new. But fast forward five years: we’ve been terrible at keeping up with Pinterest, but now they’ve done a major update that is very much applicable to your business. Stay tuned to learn everything about creating the strongest Pinterest profile in 2020!

Today on the show we have Meg Clarke of Clapping Dog Media. She is an SEO strategist who teaches creative small business owners how to grow their organic traffic and rankings so they can make a great impact and reach more people. She is also a sourdough bread baking genius, so you can look forward to several bread references throughout this episode! In Episode 45, we interviewed Meg where she talked about SEO for newbies, but today we’re taking it a step further by addressing intermediate and advanced issues that are more applicable to listeners who are somewhat experienced in this area. A lot has changed since 2017, so she discusses updated SEO practices, stuff you can do to prep your business and brand for launch and what to do if you are pivoting and need to start tackling different topics on your existing website. She also dishes out resources for finding targeting keywords and hidden SEO within your website and shares what she reckons is worth spending time on.

Before we get into the meat of the episode, it’s worth mentioning the incredible strides we have made with our SEO since a few years ago. But, while we’ve done well, we also desperately need maintenance. Our traffic used to be at a low 5 to 10% from Google despite our volume of content, but now over 50% of our traffic comes straight from search. But, as we said, we also need to brush up on our SEO, so we’re just as eager to hear what Meg’s got for us. So, pull your notebook closer and get ready for some fresh SEO strategy!

It feels like it’s been 87 months since February, both in business and life, but we are going back in time to revisit that month and stay consistent with our profit reports. We’ve heard that these episodes are super helpful to you. For those who are unfamiliar with profit reports, we started them in August of 2019, sharing not income reports but profit reports, including the exact percentages of gains, losses, and so on. Our goal is to chase higher profit margins and we share what that looks like for us and the processes we go through to get there. These episodes give you a peek into our business, which will hopefully encourage and help you in setting up your strategies without any comparisons.

Today we talk about how we used the Five Days to Launch challenge to feed Strategy Academy, why we’re okay with Trello for Business breaking even, how The Creative Template Shop blew our socks off, and why we are permitting you to pivot a little right now! Intending to double down on this learning experience, we will also be hosting a live workshop to practically guide you to implement the same things in your business. Stay tuned till the end to hear where to go to learn more about crunching the numbers!

Today on the show we have Jessica Rasdall, a motivational speaker, bestselling author, public speaking strategist, and host to the Speak to Scale Podcast to talk to us about crafting your story for the virtual stage. Now that we are homebound and communicating with our audiences online, we can do with some help when it comes to showing up as ourselves and helping people rather than just have a self-serving online presence. You’ve heard the vulnerability piece – that you need to be relatable and reveal your “humanness” to your followers, but what is the right amount of sharing?

Jessica walks us through a formula for breaking your story down into three acts so it is most helpful to people - a structure that outlines the before, middle, and after phases of your story. Each of these three phases is important: from hooking the audience and relating to their experiences to showing them how the significant event changed your life and the difficult decisions you have had to make. For Jessica, the most important aspect is the motivation behind sharing your story, and if its primary purpose is not to help your audience in some way, you might want to reconsider. Be sure to tune in to hear the rest!

Hey everybody and welcome back to the show. This is going to be a really good episode because today we are finally talking about the Human Design personality test method. We have heard such muttering about this topic and we are obsessed with personality tests in general. It’s amazing how in this Human Design model, personality is seen as something baked into who you are. You don’t get to pick or adjust over time like in other test models. It’s literally based off of your birth hour/minute/location, so you cannot change what you are.

We know very little about this topic but wanted to share what we have learned so far. Tests like the Enneagram and Myers–Briggs give you such good insight about who you are, and you can learn how to be a better person and understand your faults. The Human Design model, by contrast, can help people become more balanced through collaboration. Our conversation today is structured by running through the book Human Design: Discover the Person You Were Born To Be, which helps breakdown how Human Design came about. We will talk about some of those basic principles today and how they relate to our types as business partners. Enjoy!

Welcome back all of you lovely quarantined listeners! We are sending you some love and strength in these trying times! And in order to show you that we are having a chat with a special person today. Carrie Grace McQuaid is a former teacher who is now a full time motivational speaker and spends most of her time traveling around the country spreading joy and kindness! Sound great? We think so! She talks to companies, colleges, sororities, schools and more about how they can incorporate more joy and kindness into the workplace and their practices. The current crisis has put traveling on hold for a while, but Carrie is here specifically to help us unpack how you can share the love and offer help in these difficult times!

She has literally gone viral for her work in this area and we just wanted to bring her on to open up the conversation about feelings and thoughts and how to be kind, open up your capacity for others, take care of your mental space and what to focus on business-wise as we all hunker down for an unsure future. Everything is so unclear at the moment and a lot of things are up in the air, the economy, health, income and everything else! Carrie shares some great action steps for everyone but we would like to say if you are currently feeling overwhelmed or have too much information on your plate, maybe save this for when you are feeling a bit more receptive. It is a great episode and deserves your attention, so best to make use of it in the right headspace! We really feel that what Carrie is offering can help us be the amazing community of amazing people that we can be, so let's get into it!

Before diving into the show we wanted to let our listeners know the date on which this was recorded – March 18th – because we know the world is in a weird place right now. The strategies discussed here are hyper tailored to this moment and things could be totally different by the time you listen! In any case, from our side, we are trying to create a sense of normalcy in our business and within our friends, so we wanted to go ahead with our chat with Meghan Maydel.

The strategies our guest shares today are highly valuable due to their applicability not only in this time of pandemic and crisis but also to other spikes within the world and the industry of advertising in general that could happen in the future. Meghan talks about how advertising doesn’t just have to happen on Facebook and gives a whole bunch of pro tips about other platforms and what using them can look like for you. We will be brainstorming different ways for you to be really effective in your ads today!

Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast, we figured that – in light of the current coronavirus restrictions – it might be a good idea to share some strategies for creating a super productive work environment at home. With a great deal of travel suspended, in-person events canceled, schools closed, and employees asked to go home, people around the globe are having to think about how they can remain productive out of the office.

Some of you might already be working from home, but for some, this might be a first-time experience and we want to help you master the most common challenges when living, working and parenting in the same space. With kids at home, parents are now confronted with the added challenge of having to look after their children while still maintaining work productivity. In this episode, we dish out strategies for getting your to-do-list crossed off, whether you are a business owner, parent, or both!

Today we are joined by our badass biz bestie, Shunta Grant! Shunta has released something amazing that we think so many people in our audience need and in fact a bunch have already started using and loving! It is called The Best Today™ Guide and it is all strategy and no fluff! We will be going over the ins and outs of the guide today, so you can get a sneak peek of what is inside and the strategy behind its creation.

Shunta is a great example of someone who has taken her business to the next level and is now letting her audience in on some of her wisdom. She is the mind behind Because of Zoe Designs and her new foray into online education promises to be just as successful as what has come before. So without further ado, let's hear what she has to say!