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.

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.

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.

What we often see in the service-based industry is after 6-figures have been reached (sometimes multiple 6-figures), service providers will try to replace their current offer with something completely brand new. We know this is super tempting, especially when you’ve reached the point where you’ve started to tap out of what you can personally do within your business.

However, pricing is one of your greatest opportunities for expansion, especially when you can work with fewer people and make more money. While many may acknowledge price shifts over time, they aren’t seeing premium pricing as an opportunity to grow their team.

Looking back there is something magical about the beginning stages of business. It’s like we all had this young naive way of thinking at the beginning. You’re learning all the things, you’re hustling, you’re saying yes a lot (probably more than you should have) but you’re doing it. You’re building something that is yours.

And then you get to a point where you’re hitting 10K months consistently. You did the thing! You’ve become an established business owner BUT you’re still holding onto that “beginner” energy. Yeah, you might be making more money but you’re still feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and stretched thin.

As two self-dubbed Dubsado connoisseurs, we were over the moon when we first learned about the updates to Dubsado’s form builder. While it wasn’t terrible to use before, this upgrade that just rolled out for all accounts in July has increased our love for the platform times a thousand. Even though all of the blocks and options are basically the same, the form builder now has a whole new look that the majority of users will find more intuitive and easy to use.

We were part of the lucky group who were able to use the beta version of the new form builder for months, so we’ve already gotten used to the upgrade and have been sticking to it exclusively. Because of that, we knew we had to put out this unofficial guide to Dubsado’s new form builder!

We love Canva for all things related to simple graphics and design for our business. We use it for multiple purposes (which we list out in this blog post), especially for our templates in The Creative Template Shop. Basically, it’s the one tool that any small business owner should have in their back pocket to quickly and easily whip up graphics for their biz.

Canva has a free forever version, which already allows you to do most things. However, they also have Canva Pro which unlocks extra perks, one of those being the ability to create your brand kit(s) and have them saved to access easily when creating something. In this blog post, we’ll explain how you can create your brand in Canva, plus we include a video tutorial to show you exactly where to find everything you need!

If there’s one thing that can make or break a service-based business, it’s the experience you provide for your clients. Not only is the client experience crucial to making sure your clients are happy, leave great testimonials, refer you to others, and possibly come back for repeat business, but also perfecting your client experience allows you to sell the heck out of it in your marketing message.

Your client experience doesn’t just span from the first interaction to when you start working with them. It also includes your off boarding process and how you treat them once they’ve finished working with you. But how can you still nurture these relationships even after the project is all said and done? There are three simple yet powerful ways you can do so, and that’s what we’re going to cover in this post!

We think congratulations are in order! Since you’ve come to this blog post, that must mean you’re doing something right with your marketing, so we’re proud of you for getting to the point where you’re now officially overbooked. Although it’s stressful, this is a stage in your business that can open so many doors and opportunities that you’ve probably only been dreaming about until now!

First, though, we need to deal with the overwhelm and figure out how you can free up space on your calendar so that you can give your undivided attention to your clients, plus what to do with new leads. Keep reading as we cover all of these things and more in this blog post!