business insights
I’m officially building my first Al app. No code. No hoodie-wearing co-founder. Just me, my idea, a no-code tool called Lovable.dev, and two years of quietly training an Al on everything I know about marketing, messaging, and digital products.
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100 Profitable Digital Product Ideas
Plus, a totally free challenge to kick you into action and get this baby launched.
Empowering Managers: Harnessing AI for Effective Employee Development and Productive 1:1s
In today's fast-paced and technology-driven workplace, managers are constantly seeking innovative ways to support their employees' career development and maximize the impact of their 1:1 meetings. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool that can assist managers in achieving these goals. By leveraging AI-powered solutions, managers can gain valuable insights, facilitate personalized discussions, and provide tailored guidance to their team members. In this blog post, we will explore how managers can harness the potential of AI to develop their employees and have more effective 1:1s. We will also provide specific prompts that you can ask an AI language model like Chat GPT to enhance your 1:1 interactions and empower your employees' career growth.
Service Providers Earning Less than $5k Per Month: Essential Skills You Need to Have a Successful Business
There’s undoubtedly a flood of information and resources on the internet for service providers looking to grow their income to $5k+ months. Unfortunately, that also means that it can be difficult to know where to look, what to search for that’ll actually be helpful, and find reliable resources. When you’re a smaller business, your number one priority is essentially increasing your revenue, and there are a number of skills that are essential to have in order to make that happen.
In this post, we’ll be giving you our best resources to help you hone in on those skills so that you can finally break free of the feast or famine mode that so many small service-based businesses find it hard to come out of in the beginning stages of business.
Maximizing Your Potential: Understand the Relationship Between Capacity and Business Goals
One of the largest issues we see in the service industry, specifically related to CEOs and their time, is that they aren’t aware of what their capacity is or how to best split their time to focus on all of the areas that need their attention. Without the knowledge of what baseline their capacity should cover (i.e. 20% in this area and 10% in another), they also aren’t able to see the clear path forward to reaching their goals. In this post, we’ll be breaking down how your time should be spent as a CEO and how to understand your capacity and its effects on your business goals.
How to Know When You Should Pivot or Start Over in Your Business
There comes a point in every service-based business owner’s journey (especially in this market) where they hit what feels like a huge cement wall. Leads feel harder to come by, prospects feel harder to close, and it seems the only way to get through it is to either demolish the wall or change directions. In this case, that would mean pivoting your offer or scrapping everything you’ve built and starting over.
How to Identify and Define Values That Your Business Can Actually Live In
Something we’ve noticed is overlooked by many new or growing business owners is creating brand values. You may think since your business is small or because you may not have a team, that means they aren’t important at the moment, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you want to ensure you’re developing a clear and concise brand, creating consistent brand awareness, and attracting the right kinds of clients and audience to your business, then you need to identify and define your brand values.
Roundup: 5 Must Have Templates to Help You Review Your Year in Business and Plan for 2023
The end of the year is possibly our most favorite season of business! It’s the time where you get to reflect on your year in business, assess your analytics and results, and plan for the year ahead. Because this is such a fun time for us, we love making sure our audience is equipped with the resources to help them make these things happen. In The Creative Template Shop, we drop so many helpful templates for reflection and new year planning.
With hundreds of templates to choose from, we wanted to do a quick round-up of our top 5 must-have templates to review your year in business and plan for 2023!
9 Critical Questions for Building Lead Capture Forms
With everything we try in marketing our services, we do it with the goal of ensuring we’re speaking to our ideal clients and making it clear who the offer is for. This way, we’ll have as many qualified leads as possible that fill out our lead capture form. But something that often goes unchecked or doesn’t have much strategy put into it is what information you’re actually asking for on the form. If you want to repel unqualified leads while also making sure you’re gathering all of the information you need to make that initial “possible fit” decision, then this is definitely something you should put thought towards.
In this post we’ll be covering 9 critical questions that we recommend service providers include in your lead capture form! (These are questions aside from the usual spaces to collect contact information.)
The Ultimate Guide to Creating Dubsado Workflows
One of the ultimate ways to make Dubsado serve as your very own Virtual Assistant is to utilize Dubsado Workflows. Workflows are our absolute favorite feature of Dubsado because we’re able to automate so many aspects of our usual client process. In turn, this frees up so much time to allow us to give our clients and their projects the attention that they deserve without worrying about chasing down payments, sending off emails or forms, scheduling meetings, and so much more.
Keep reading to learn more about workflows, how they work, what you should do before creating them, and how you can be using them in your business right now!
What You Need to Know About Client Acquisition in 2022
Client acquisition is likely the single-handed most asked about topic we get from our audience and members of our various communities. Lately, we’ve been hearing a common complaint from business owners that they need more leads. While there have been some market shifts recently, they’re not necessarily impacting the way we acquire clients. It may feel like it’s changing when actually, everything with clients is exactly the same.
Here’s the thing; marketing is cyclical. There are things that work now that aren’t going to work in 6 months, then in 2 years, those things could come right back around again. There will always be hotspots, but you shouldn’t rely on them if you want consistency. We have lots to talk about on this topic, so let’s dive in!
The Best Way to Streamline Your Client Projects as a Service Provider
Managing your client experience is one thing, but managing and streamlining your client projects is a whole other beast to tackle as a service provider. You might be wondering what the difference is, so when we talk about managing your client experience, we mean all of the communication, appointment scheduling, sending forms, proposals, contracts, getting paid, and all that jazz. (Dubsado’s our trusted CRM for that– here’s why.)
On the other hand, you also have to deal with the actual tasks that come with fulfilling a client project for both you and your team. For this, we recommend using a project management system like Asana. It’s robust enough to handle even the most complex projects, yet simple enough that if you don’t need to use all of the fancy-shmancy extras, you don’t have to.
Today we’ll be diving into the best way to streamline your client projects using Asana!
Hiring a Contractor Vs. Employee – What is the Difference
We know that getting ready to hire and actually going through the process can feel like an overwhelming mountain to climb. It feels like you have 1,287 things to learn about the intricacies of different positions, titles, types of hires, tasks, job descriptions, etc. But one of the first things that needs to be decided on first is - are you ready to hire a contractor or an employee?
Don’t worry. In this blog, we’re going to share our best hiring tips and clearly tell you the differences between hiring a contractor and an employee.
How to Build a Team that Allows You to Scale
Building a team is an incredibly powerful tool that will take you to the next level… that is, if you get it right. When it comes to hiring, the more you know, the more equipped you’ll be to face whatever comes your way. Over the years we’ve hired a slew of part-time contractors, contractors that felt like extensions of our team, part-time and full-time employees. We’ve literally hired ‘em all! Through all of that we’ve learned a lesson or 37 that we’d love to share with you.
Identify The Results You Want and Create a Profitable Offer
When you first started your business, you probably came up with your services and offers like you were throwing spaghetti at the wall. You were just hoping to get some customers and start making some money.
However, after some time goes by, hoping is something you no longer want to do. Usually as you become more established, you want a reliable form of income, you want dreamy clients, you want clear boundaries and you want steady growth.
Well, having spaghetti thrown services and offers isn’t going to get you there. If you’re not getting the spaghetti reference (lol), what I’m trying to say is that your offer needs to be clear, precise and profitable. And by getting that type of profitable offer you first need to identify the results you want AND to identify the results you want you need to go through a handful steps.
So, in today's blog, I’m going to walk you through how to strategically identify the results you want and how to create a profitable offer.
10 of Our Favorite Tools for Team Productivity & Communication
We love systems and tools (surprise, surprise). We’re always upgrading a process, trying out new tools that we think will benefit our team, and generally seeing what’s helpful and ends up sticking long-term. In doing so, we’ve accumulated a small staple collection of tools that massively benefit our team productivity and communication, which are two of the most important aspects of managing a team.
Stepping into our roles as not only managers but leaders, learning how members of our team work best, how they prefer to communicate, and ensuring that we have the necessary tools to aid in that has served us and our team members so well.
There are 10 tools that are our absolute couldn’t-live-without-them favorites, and we’re so excited to share them with you today! If you don’t adopt some of these exact tools for your team, hopefully the goal behind them inspires you to create something similar.
3 Reasons Why You Need a Business Coach (Even if You’re an Established Business)
We think hiring a business coach is one of the best decisions you can make for your business (we might be a tad bit biased 😜). But having someone who can help you with your business’s ups and downs is great for your sanity and for getting actionable advice to help you uplevel your business.
In this blog, we’re talking about three reasons why you need a business coach. And here’s the thing, we’re talking to all you established business owners out there because, from our experience, you could use someone in your corner.
Welcome to My Blog
Hey, I’m Abagail Pumphrey!
You know when you are so deeply passionate about something you can’t help but share it? That’s how this blog has felt for the last decade. I’ve written about my latest strategies, tech how-tos, experience with scaling and so much more. I hope you find just what you’re looking for. We’re here to help!
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