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!

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.)

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!

In this day and age of hot trends that dissipate just as quickly as they come, the backbone of marketing tends to be forgotten about: relationships. In every social media strategy, you’re trying to post the things that will build a better relationship with your target audience. When running paid ads, you’re picking and choosing who you want to display the ad to so that you can nurture those relationships. But when you strip away whatever conduit you try to mask it in, relationship marketing will bring so much more reward when implemented as the real, raw thing.

We’ve been able to successfully sell our services over the years mostly thanks to relationship marketing, and we can’t wait to share with you 5 ways to create lifelong customers and clients.

The thing about paid ads and social media is that no matter how excellent your strategy is, more often than not, you’re bombarded with leads that aren’t at the quality you need them to be. Heck, any kind of marketing can be confusing because of all of the new trends that come in hot and go just as quickly. We’ve said it a million times before, but relationship building and networking is where you’ll find your highest quality leads and potential clients. It’s even possible to do this and gain new clients in just one week.

In this post, we’ll be teaching you how to narrow down your offer, find your network, reach out to potential clients, and hold discovery calls and coffee dates all in the span of a week.

For the last seven years, we’ve worked with clients in a variety of capacities. When we first joined forces and started offering services, we were a local branding and marketing boutique. Then we flourished in the online course industry, but over the last year, we’ve been working with a handful of clients outside of our typical education products inside the Incubator. We loved getting back to the 1:1 experience, so we decided to open up a waitlist for our done-for-you services to a wider audience.

Lots of tweaking and repeating took place, but in 30 days we’d contracted $118k at a 60% close rate. Keep reading as we break down how we did it!

Perfectionism, procrastination and imposter syndrome are three struggles that go hand in hand. When perfectionism is discussed in our industry, or in the context of work and running a small business, it often gets paired with negative behavior like procrastination. This causes indecision and feeling like you don’t actually have any idea what you’re doing, otherwise known as imposter syndrome.

Luckily, there are ways to not overcome these feelings– there isn’t some mindset exercise you can do to make them completely disappear, but you can make shifts to prevent them from inhibiting growth in your business and perhaps actually serve you. Keep reading to find out how!

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!

At this point, we think we’ve established that Dubsado is the perfect CRM for service-based businesses. Really, it doesn’t even matter what kind of service-based business you are or what industry you’re in– Dubsado is almost guaranteed to be a surefire option for you.

However, many people use it in different ways depending on their industry and their own client processes, one of those industries being event planners. So, today, we want to cover how to use Dubsado specifically to improve your client experience as an event planner!