Top Business Podcast • over 4 million downloads • 900+ episodes

The Strategy Hour Podcast

with abagail pumphrey

Recognized by INC and Forbes as one of the best podcasts for entrepreneurs, join our twice-weekly show as we share business strategies, interviews, and actionable advice for building an online business your way.

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Our Episodes

Podcast, Services Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Services Abagail Pumphrey

If You Want to Grow Your Service-Based Business Don’t Make This Huge Mistake

The opinions we share in this conversation might make you uncomfortable, and that’s okay! Today’s show addresses one of the patterns we’ve seen emerge among our clients: their goals are amazing, but the path they intend to take to get there keeps them playing small. This week we dive into the top scaling mistakes we see businesses make.

Getting distracted with new ideas is a common mistake we see as a business owner’s success accelerates. It is easy for them to neglect the health of their core mission and chase shiny objects.

We’ll brainstorm with you, regardless of how you intend to move forward, but we do have some hard-earned insights that suggest that staying focused on the skillset you have and knowing your value can lead you to a place where growth becomes potential. You CAN find the time and money freedom you’ve been dreaming of; it’s never too late to get back to your zone of genius, or to change, transition, and pivot to work on what you should be workin

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Podcast, Scaling Guest User Podcast, Scaling Guest User

Strategically Choosing to Build a Business with Less Profits in Pursuit of Financial Freedom

Let’s start by saying it’s okay to be wherever you find yourself in your financial journey! This one is for those of us who are working our faces off on the back end, and not seeing this translate to profits. Maybe you’ve already identified your first baby step to start working towards your goal. Today’s episode is about identifying your goals and putting them into action. We’re here to equip you with the tools you need to put those steps into action with a long-term goal in mind, from identifying what you want out of it, to learning what you need to learn to grow a healthy business.

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

Where Boss Project is Headed in 2022

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!

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

November 2021 Profit Report: Creating Real Sustainable Income and Dissecting Our New Growth Trajectory

Welcome back to another profit report! We’re going back in time to talk about November 2021. We’ve been doing these profit reports for over two years, and we can’t believe how time has flown by! For those who are new to the profit report, in these episodes, we offer a breakdown of our strategies and decisions, as well as insights into how money moves around within a company like ours. It allows you to gain an informed perspective on what it looks like to grow a company of our size, and hear insider conversations about things like healthy profit margins and expenses.

Today, we talk about our launch in October and how it has affected our November profits, including recurring revenue from people who made purchases in October. We unpack some of the exciting changes we’ve made, particularly when it comes to budgeting and reimagining how we’re going to continue to grow and scale. You’ll also hear about why a lot of this comes down to hiring and how we make decisions around that based on projections of client needs and outcomes. Tune in for a detailed breakdown of our profit report, insights into our goals for next year, and why we are so excited to grow!

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

Creating Benefits to Attract Top Talent

This week on the Strategy Hour podcast, we discuss how to create benefits that will attract top talent while also allowing your company to thrive. Running your business can often put you in situations where you have to compromise, but that doesn’t mean those compromises have to be permanent. Once you reach the point where you can take on new staff, you can begin to ask yourself what benefits you can offer versus what you want to offer. It won’t happen overnight, but setting out goals that build towards your vision for your company can be incredibly motivating!

Hiring new staff can come with a series of unanticipated costs outside of their salaries, like taxes and opening new 401K plans. While it may seem overwhelming at first, a little planning goes a long way. We’ve benefited greatly from having expert consultants advise us on how to take on new hires, from accountants to help us with cash flow, to HR’s advice on how to structure maternity leave and healthcare benefits. It’s been incredibly exciting entering this stage of our business, where we can grow our work community and set goals for how we can support our employees in every aspect of their lives! We fully believe that you are so much more than your job and your career, and we want to support all those elements from family, to friends, to health and alternative medicine.

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Podcast, Scaling Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Scaling Abagail Pumphrey

The Shift that Doubled Our Business in 4 Months

We have to get creative about how we manage human resources within a completely digital team that is just growing and growing! It’s been the wildest 6 months. You will go through seasons of your business where you are very sure about what you want and what you don’t want, but remember that you have the right to change your mind. What we wanted two years ago is not at all what we want right now, but we’re not mad about it. When you change your mind about something, it’s probably because you have learned more, or have more confidence or more skills in that particular area, and that is nothing to feel bad about! This episode is all about the mindset shift which led us to change something in our business that caused an unprecedented level of growth!

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

October 2021 Profit Report: Increasing our MRR by 77% in Less than 7 Days

We’ve been working on something exciting for a really long time and today’s episode exists to introduce you to our newest offering, which includes taking on clients for our business incubator! Our business was working. We could have successfully continued with our existing plan. Instead, we made an intentional move, looked at what we wanted to do, saw that the mission was the same as when we started, and then asked ourselves how we could achieve even more of that!

If you can focus less on what you want and more on the problem you are actively solving for your audience, the doors will open. Your business should take care of you, NOT drain you! We want you to know that where we are today is the result of having a full staff of people, an audience in the millions, and six whole years of hard work, which is why we are sharing some insight into our hiring process, the art of simmering, our desire to take on clients again, and so much more in our October profit report for 2021! Join us today!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Exiting Corporate and Stepping Into Building YOUR Brand and Business with Shaunda Head of SHH Creative

In today’s episode, we gain a really interesting perspective on the topic of branding from Shaunda Head, an Atlanta-based brand strategist and digital marketer who helps women align ALL THE THINGS in their brand so that their brand message can impact more powerfully! We chat about Shaunda’s experience of building her expertise in corporate institutions and the challenges of the transition between that world and going out on her own. Shaunda also shares the process she went through to uncover who she really is, rather than who she was when she was working for someone else.

A lot of our clients are in the same position; you guys are highly skilled, you know your shit, and you can serve people in incredible ways, but figuring out how to do that outside of someone else’s umbrella can be what is holding you back. This episode will give you some amazing ideas on how to rebrand yourself so you can step into who you truly are, so make sure to join us today to learn more from the amazing Shaunda Head!

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

Passive Income Doesn't Exist (Here's What to Do Instead)

We recently brought in an amazing cohort of clients inside of the incubator. Throughout that process we’ve read hundreds of applications, and there are two sentences that we found as a recurring theme and desire within these applications which we really want to respond to. We’ve got a lot to say on this topic, and we feel very passionately about it, so get ready for the rant! People have this elusive idea that they want to earn a passive income. In other words, they want to earn money in their sleep.

There is a version of this that does exist, and we’ll happily share that with you, but passive income isn’t what you think it is. If you believe that if you’re not chasing passive income then you’re doing business wrong, you need to listen to this. The way passive income is framed in the online industry is toxic, and can cause you to miss out on so many great opportunities. We know that passive income sounds like a perfect scenario, but today you’ll hear why it’s really not all that cracked up to be!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Unpopular Opinion: The Toxic Behavior That is Rampant Inside the Business "Education" Industry

There’s a massive problem that’s affecting our entire audience right now, and we have some seriously strong feelings about it, which you’re going to hear all about in today’s episode. Do you guys remember that show called Celebrity Deathmatch? That’s what we’re doing today, but we’ve got “serving” and “marketing” in the ring. We are furious on behalf of our clients because of how they have been manipulated into wasting so much of their time and money.

Today, we’re going on record to say that the business education industry is rampant with marketing pros trying to teach other people to be marketing minions instead of actually teaching foundational business concepts that don’t change. Marketing is in our blood, so we get the desire to do this, but marketing is not the key to success. Hear us out.

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Podcast, Project Management Guest User Podcast, Project Management Guest User

How to Hire a Personal Assistant and Delegate Tasks Strategically

When we first began to consider that we may need personal assistants, we discovered that we had some unexpected, and somewhat complicated, reservations. While the extra help would certainly have been welcome, we had a tough time justifying the hire in our minds. Hiring an assistant brought up an unexpected amount of mind junk, from outdated notions around a woman’s role in the house to Emylee’s very personal experience of her mom and nana owning a cleaning business, and it just seemed impossible to align the hire with our values. Add to that the terrible depictions of personal assistants that you saw in movies like The Devil Wears Prada, where PAs were always repeatedly degraded by their bosses, and the idea of hiring a personal assistant could easily make you feel like a monster.

It took us months and years to finally process and overcome these limiting beliefs and ultimately make one of the best decisions of our careers! Not only was hiring a personal assistant much more affordable and manageable than we expected, but we hadn’t anticipated the amount of freedom, peace of mind, and brain space it would give us! No matter where you are in your career, hiring a personal assistant is likely a much more achievable goal than you realize. In this episode, we break down how we chose to get a personal assistant, the process we used to prioritize our needs and reflect on how our personal assistants impacted our lives. So let’s dive in!

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

A Bookkeeper's Perspective on the 1:1 vs. 1:Many Business Model with Parker Stevenson

Put your socks on, pour a fresh cup of coffee and tune into this conversation with Parker Stevenson. If you’re a service provider who wants to make more and work less, today’s episode is for you! It’s not that we’re comparing one business model against the other, but rather, we’re considering an informed perspective on the 1:1 and 1:many approaches to business.

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Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey Podcast, Leadership Abagail Pumphrey

September 2021 Profit Report: Growing Our Membership 26% in Revenue in 30 Days

We’re taking it back to September! It feels weird, but we’re going to recap all of the amazing, incredible things that we did in the month of September so that you guys can get a little peek behind the curtains and get to understand what goes on in our brains and why we do the things we do. September was only last month, but it feels like a lifetime ago because we have been moving fast and furiously at team Boss Project.

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Podcast, Leadership Guest User Podcast, Leadership Guest User

Unpopular Opinion: Courses & Digital Products are NOT the Fastest Way to Double Your Income

This episode comes with a bit of a trigger warning. We're both feeling a bit nervous about this one, which has never happened before. It's based on the conversations that we have privately with each other when we see peers, clients, and students making the wrong assumptions about the topic that we're going to talk about today. We decided that we're doing a disservice by only having those conversations privately. What lights us up is to impact others and to change their lives and to have small business owners be financially and soulfully fulfilled, and to do that we feel that we have to share our take on this.

If this conversation doesn't apply to you, you can skip it. If you are already crushing it and your business is made up primarily of courses and digital products and you're thriving and meeting your financial goals, then this conversation isn't for you. However, if you started as a service-based business owner and have added on courses and digital products and you have struggled financially and stressed yourself out because of it, then this episode is most definitely for you!

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Podcast, Services Guest User Podcast, Services Guest User

The 3 Biggest Time Wasters Holding Service Providers Back From Working Less Hours in Their Business

Time is our most valuable resource, because it is so limited, and yet is the thing that we see people giving away freely all the time. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about three giant time wasters that are really holding service providers back from working less in their business. It is possible to work less, and it is possible to make more by working less! Feeling frazzled and disconnected are such common experiences that people have started to think this is normal, so they keep doing it. We want you to know that this doesn’t have to be your reality. When we accepted that there are going to be different seasons and phases and iterations of our business, we were able to let go of the pressure of finding perfect solutions to our problems, and find peace in the fact that things are constantly evolving and that’s okay!

If you feel like you don’t have enough time, we’ve got a training course that is just for you. We’re going to teach you how to double your income by working less than 20 hours a week. This is something we’ve perfected, so we are speaking from experience, and trust us when we say this is something you don’t want to miss! Go to bossproject.com/incubator to sign up.

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meet your host

I don’t believe there’s one right way to build a business.

I’m your host, Abagail Pumphrey. And I’m dedicated to supporting online businesses.

I’m here to help you build business your way: one that supports not only the life you have but the life you want. I’m on a personal mission to help you become financially free.

I’m talking about all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a 7-figure online business. I’m here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way, whether you’re creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business.

I want to hear your hot takes, your biggest takeaways, or the genius ideas that pop in your head as you’re listening to the show.

My DMs are always open on Instagram, so head over and introduce yourself so I can get to know you!

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Software & Services We Swear By

Meet Our Partners

The links below are affiliate links. We receive a commission (at no additional cost to you) when you purchase through these links.

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Digital Product Jumpstart

Build your list and grow your revenue at the same time!

I’ve kept these details to myself for far too long. I’m ready to spill everything and give you the exact steps that’ve helped me generate tens of thousands of qualified leads and MILLIONS in low-ticket digital product sales. I won’t just show you what I did, I’ll teach you how you can do it too.

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