We know firsthand how challenging it can be to build and grow a business that can withstand the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. We’ve worked with service providers in all stages of business, and while they can all equally be difficult to navigate, they each come with their own unique struggles. For the service providers who are already hitting $20k months and beyond, there are essential skills needed in order to continue building a sustainable business and experience continued growth.

There comes a time in every service provider’s career when you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling on your income and time. You really want to hit those $20k months, but you would need 24 hours of daylight alone to be able to make that happen or at least a few clones of yourself. At this point, it’s crucial that you start scaling your business, thinking about hiring, raising your prices, cleaning up your systems, and more– all the things that, coincidentally, we love talking about and have had numerous conversations about on our blog and podcast.

To save you the time, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to compile our resources on all of the topics you need to be learning about right now so that you can get unstuck from this rut and grow a thriving service-based 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.

The main point of design trends is to break expectations. We want an element of surprise, whether that’s through color, shapes and patterns, animation, or overall layout. This’ll be reflected in the trends we’ve noticed that we’re going to break down for you in this post, but don’t let these trends intimidate you– there are a lot of ways to add in that organic surprise that feels really true to your brand direction.

Sometimes, being in business since 2015, makes us feel a little prehistoric. Our company has certainly had its fair share of evolutions and pivots as not only we have grown, but our clients as well. We’ve had the privilege of working with folks from across the globe whether they tune in to our top-charting podcast, get sucked into our rabbit hole with our Trello for Business course, join our growing community of creatives, work with us in an intimate group setting or hang out with us 1:1 to tackle the big stuff. We thought it was time for us to update you on our suite of offerings and give you insight on how you can make magic happen with us.

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.

There is, without a doubt, one thing that can make or break your service-based business: capacity. This is something that has dramatic effects when not practiced carefully or correctly, and the people who are doing it wrong are often those who are overworked and underpaid. By not understanding your capacity in an in-depth and intimate way, you’re constantly sacrificing your mental health and wellbeing, you probably feel like everything is working against you, and you may not be making the progress you’d like to see in your goals.

In this post, we hope to leave you with tons more clarity on how capacity works, its cause-and-effect nature, and how to finally leave the path of burnout.

We recently wrote about whether or not service providers should pivot your offer or start over (you can read that post over here). We wouldn’t be Boss Project if we didn’t practice what we preached, so we’ve had a change in the works regarding our program, The Incubator. After 18+ months of data from clients going through our program, we saw a need for our own pivot. We’ve always prioritized not adding fluff and making sure that our offers aren’t overwhelming, so we analyzed our data and cut what wasn’t making a difference.

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.