2020 feels a bit like a lifetime ago, even though we are only a few weeks into January. Even though we projected and gave you some ideas of where we might land, we are still so surprised with how last year ended up going for us. For all of us, 2020 will be a standout year for good and bad reasons. For us, it was ridiculous how our business year ended up. When big things happen in the world, you don’t know how they’re going to impact you, your partner, your family, your business, the climate, and the people buying your product. Everything.

Being in charge of how you make money is sometimes scary when you can’t control all of those scenarios. So, we are so thankful that we had the time and space in January 2020 to set the expectations of what we wanted to do, and more importantly, what we didn’t want to do for the year. This really helped because when shit hit the fan (and continued to hit the fan throughout the year), we were really focused on securing our foundation. And, in December 2020, this is what caught us.

In today’s episode, we speak with Dresean Ryan. He started his SEO career only four years ago after bootstrapping it and learning everything he could to make a better life for himself. Dresean has gone on to work with some large companies like Etna, Signa, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. He helps his clients make millions of dollars just by improving their search engine optimization.

Today we are diving into how you can DIY this process and how you can learn how to hire the right kind of person. Dresean breaks down SEO in an easily-understandable, digestible way to keep things simple for you. He supplies listeners with actionable steps to outlining your content, deciding what your content should be, and then creating that content. To do this, Dresean uses a bunch of excellent tools — both free and paid — and references his amazing resources at the end, including his very own program you can use or even pass on to your VA. This ensures that even if you’re not up to speed with SEO in your business, someone on your team definitely will be. Let’s get to it then!

We get a million DMs from people saying they are ready to strike out on their own and telling us they will listen and start with services. If you have been listening for some time now, you will know just how much we believe in service-based businesses. But before you do anything, as always, we recommend you listen to our second episode, back in 2017, the year we launched the show, where we had Abagail on as a guest.

In that episode, Emylee interviewed her to find out how she replaced her corporate income after getting laid off. Since we reference that episode a billion times, we thought it would be fun to do a 2021 version, where we find out how Abagail would handle the same situation today. Some of the things might be similar, but what are the new strategies Abagail would leverage now? Technology and marketing have changed so much that there are sure to be a few new ways to bounce back quicker.

Joining us today on the podcast is Kali Rogers, the Founder of Blush Online Life Coaching, a life coaching business aimed at female millennials. Kali is here to teach us more about the super do-able, fun and stress-free Pinterest strategies that have boosted their site traffic and sales and grown their clients and customers. The best of all? You don’t need a Pinterest marketing degree to implement them, you can start today! If you have a Pinterest account but have stopped using it for some reason, we hope this episode will inspire you to get back into it, or if you have been utilizing this potentially awesome tool, that you will get what you need to brush up your skills even more.

In the beginning, Kali used Pinterest for personal reasons such as recipes and fashion inspo, until she decided to take a break. At first she didn’t see how Pinterest, a mostly visual medium, would be applicable to Blush, a service-based business. How would she promote a life coaching business through images? When she first started she didn’t have any entrepreneurial skills but realized she needed to communicate to people that she and her team knew what they were talking about. She resorted to writing as a cheap, safe means of publicity, creating numerous articles for The Huffington Post, including “An Open Letter From Introverts To Everyone Else”, which went completely viral. Many people have a Pinterest account when they first get started in business, but then they get distracted along the way and stop using it on a regular basis. In this episode we are going to show you that even though it’s an oldie, it’s still a real goodie. So be sure to join us for this awesome conversation!

Today we get to talk about one of our favorite things — meetings the Traction way! While most people hate meetings, we are going to share a few things that might change your mind. Meetings are notorious for consuming a lot of time, often with little real progress, but we will present you with an outline that will make your every meeting from here on out a super productive, efficient one. We’ve spoken about the book Traction many times, but we want to remind you once more to go read it because this is where this outline and our guidelines around meetings come from.

Sometimes a meeting is not necessary and a Slack message or quick update will suffice, but other times having a meeting makes sense, and therefore it’s important to know how to approach them. Having a weekly meeting keeps all parties fully informed on decisions that were made, as it can be easy to think that everybody is in the loop when they’re not. If you are someone who has little patience for inefficiency and is always looking for the quickest, most productive ways to communicate and do things, this outline is perfect for you! This is as applicable to small teams as it is big ones, and don’t hesitate to ask your contractor to attend these meetings. Be sure to tune in to this episode to get the best strategy for efficient meetings!

Today on the show we have Jordan Gill. Jordan is an operations consultant and the founder of Systems Saved Me. She helps overwhelmed, one-woman shows become streamlined solopreneurs and her jam is creating a cohesive operating system for managing your tasks, files, and inbox. But today we are actually talking about something that could really change the game for you if you are running a service-based business. If you are the type of service-based babe who resents client workloads and is not a fan of the lengthy, back-and-forth communications, and is thinking about changing your entire business because you are almost on the brink of burnout, we encourage you to listen to this episode first!

What we are sharing today is all about VIP days. With VIP days, you’ll create an amazing, lengthy, costly, profit-inducing service for your clients that also leaves them with a great impression of you. VIP days will also help you to free up your time for the rest of the year so you can do other things in your business. Jordan shares all about how she structures VIP days, how they changed her business, the lessons they taught her as a creative, and how you can implement them in your own business. Spoiler alert – in part of this episode we are talking about using a system that is going to make your VIP experience even better. And that system is Dubsado!

Welcome to our 500th episode! That means we have spoken on air for 22,500 minutes or 16 days, and we are not going anywhere anytime soon. For us, there is no shortage of things to say about business, life, and everything in between. We could talk for 500 more episodes on all of these things! Today's show will be a smorgasbord of us talking about our memories, favorite highlights, not just of the show, but being in business in general. We discuss some of the cool things the show has done for us, our best episodes, and everything in between. We are so proud we have made it to 500, and with no plans of slowing down anytime soon, you don’t have to worry about not hearing our beautiful voices. We have had so much fun and are so grateful that we continued with the podcast despite the ebbs and flows of running a business. Often creative projects fall by the wayside, but this podcast has stayed steady for three years, and we could not be prouder. We are not sure how we kept it going for so long when other things, like our blog, got cut after some time. While we are back blogging once a week, this podcast has been the one constant alongside our business.

On today’s episode we are super-duper excited to host Ashley Knight. Ashley founded the Hello Boss Community (no longer active) as a means to support and bolster other businesswomen who were in the same boat as her. Through her group she was able to teach and coach strategy to dedicated members and she loved it! And we love her for it! Here at the Strategy Hour Podcast we know the value of the groups we have run and been a part of, they can be the lifeboat bringing you back in when you are out at sea, so we know exactly what Ashley is talking about!

In our discussion we cover the early stages of starting a supportive community, relationships within this space, real world events, social media, sensitivity masterminds and much more. Ashley is one of the most dedicated community founders we have spoken to and we are sure her attitude and advice is going to be wonderfully useful and inspiring to all of our listeners. So whether you are part of an online community or looking to start one yourself, this is definitely the episode for you. Listen in to get the low-down.

Are you ready to plan the year ahead? It might be easier to do when you’ve had a great 2020 but, even then, you can plan to stick to the plan! We know we just want more of what we had but we are also keen to try new things too. In 2020, we found the sweet spot of being consistent and boring and realized that they are our middle names. We embrace them, we love them, and this is where we flourish and feel comfortable. While it’s not flashy or sexy and it doesn’t do dances on TikTok, we are 100% okay with that!

Not all of us dream of making seven figures. For some of us, our businesses are perfect the way they are when they work for us instead of us working for them. In other words, while you might not roll in the dough, if you are satisfied with what your business brings in and it supports you to the extent that it suits your lifestyle, who cares about the rest? It is worth remembering that you risk much more when you try to grow and scale your business aggressively, and many have closed their doors after pursuing exponential growth instead of keeping to the stable and consistent things. We would like to be around, no matter what happens in the world, and we believe that we can do that by doing more of the same-old same-old. This strategy will not get us on Oprah’s couch or anything spectacular like that, and we don’t have $10 million growth plans, but tune in to hear how we are planning to bring boring, stable, and consistent back!