The new year is fast approaching, and with it comes excitement, planning, and a whole of strategizing! We want to take all the things that worked so well in 2021, and carry it over into 2022. One of the biggest changes we’ve experienced in the last 12 months, is taking on a host of new full-time employees and growing our team! Soon, our full-time employees will even outnumber our regular contractors! It’s been really exciting expanding our business family, and we’ve learned a lot in the process.

To prepare for 2022 we’ve brain dumped all our anxieties and aspirations for the coming year onto paper, and blocked out our calendar accordingly. This is the biggest team we’ve ever worked with and we’re excited to take a far more structured approach to scheduling time-off, holidays, and blackout days. We’re taking everything we’ve integrated into our lives about how we run our business and are passing it on to the team. To learn more about our trajectory for 2022 and how we’ll be growing our business, tune in today!

A year is a long time, and you forget some things that happened throughout the year. We consistently overestimate what we can accomplish in a short period of time, and dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. A lot can happen in a year! We’re taking a walk down memory lane to discuss the things that have happened throughout the year!

While we feel mostly like the same people, we’re coming from a different starting point at the end of 2021 than at the beginning. There’s some irony to the decisions we made this year. This year, we decided not to grow, but to maintain the business that we had. We needed a breather. Despite that being true, we grew topline revenue by nearly 20%. The lesson? We don’t give rest the credit it deserves! That period of rest was a lot more significant than we give it credit for and it prepared us for easily the busiest year we’ve ever had.

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.

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.

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.

You may have wondered what kind of revenue our business made over the holiday season, so today we’re giving you all the details about December. So, even though we’re properly settled into 2020 by now, let’s just backtrack a little to the end of 2019 – because there’s still something we can learn there. During this past December, we took time off for family and enjoying the holidays, but we also prepared ourselves for a big launch in January. We recognized making a big profit was not on the cards for this month as we had other plates spinning and purposefully decided to focus on our long-term vision. 

Sometimes it’s okay not to have profit as your biggest priority each month because as your business evolves, different things are required at different times. Sometimes you have to do the groundwork for what is to come and sacrifice the quick short-term cash and by listening to this episode, you will hear that this was what December looked like for us. Still, we talk about the outstanding performance of our Trello for Business course, why we expected a decline in profit from Strategy Academy, how we’ve rediscovered the power of strategic emails, and a whole lot more! 

Today we are giving Emylee the guest chair and are diving into her newish side-hustle, making clay earrings! You have probably heard it mentioned on the show in the past couple of months since she started hand-making everything from home and selling it through her personal Instagram account. She has kept the whole thing quite fun and casual, not wanting to put too much pressure on the fledgling business. 

In this episode, we talk about four major thoughts and ideas for growth in a product-based business and Emylee weighs in with her experience of each. The truth is her earring side-hustle might be a fully-blown business soon! So without further ado, let's hear what she has to say and get into some strategy!