Today on the show we are joined by the wonderful and inspiring Kathleen Cutler! Kathleen has worked behind the scenes on multiple million dollar online stores with her main area of focus being jewelers. She has coached over a hundred different jewelers to help them achieve their business goals and get their products selling online, but Kathleen’s expertise extends so much further than just jewelry! She wants to help everyone selling products or even services online to extend the experience of the customer and drive sales through the type connections that you would usually associate with a physical retail space.

Welcome to another Profit Report episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Today, we’re talking about April 2021 and, needless to say, some money got spent, some money got made. We didn’t launch anything new in April, so this report makes a direct correlation with the fact that we have tried to build a profitable and sustainable business that brings in income, regardless of whether or not we are launching something new every month. We were still, however, working on some big projects, so we were certainly knee-deep behind the scenes! Sometimes, when that happens, we will see a dip in profitability, not necessarily in revenue, and that was the case for us in April. In this episode, we share some of the projects we have been working on, such as some exciting shop website updates and a very niche copywriting assignment, and we also discuss the benefits of choosing when not to invest, especially when it comes at the cost of truly trusting yourself!

Tuning in, you’ll hear about some of the lessons we have learned over the past month, the past year, and the past 18 to 24 months, including the value of exposing yourself to other cultures, perspectives, ideas, and even industries. We also reflect on some of the mistakes we have made in order to help you avoid making the same mistakes in the future, so make sure not to miss this episode!

Today on the show, we are excited to welcome Abbey Ashley, Founder of The Virtual Savvy. Abbey has helped aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. She started her own virtual assistant business as a new mom and was able to double her salary from her full-time corporate job in just 30 days! She has since gone on to grow a seven-figure business with 19 employees and certainly has some key insights to share about how to hire to scale. It's now her passion to help others start their own VA businesses so they too can taste the freedom and flexibility of entrepreneurship.

She is currently building a brand new platform, which you will hear about towards the end of the interview, that is going to make hiring so much easier, especially for creative entrepreneurs, connecting you with virtual assistants that are going to stick around and be the right fit for you and your company. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the hiring process, particularly how to hire for a culture fit over a skill fit. We think that that is one of the most remarkable things that Abbey has unlocked within her own business, and it has definitely been one of the key elements that has factored into her incredibles success.

We discuss how to identify your brand culture, how to speak that into existence within your team, and how to support your team through that journey, as well as how to hire for the perfect fit, of course. Whether you are ready to hire your first VA or dip your toes into hiring employees, this episode is full of practical tips that will be beneficial to you, no matter where you are on that journey. Make sure to tune into this insightful interview with The Virtual Savvy Founder and powerhouse entrepreneur, Abbey Ashley!

Quarantine gave Abagail every excuse to drop any kind of consistency around movement, and now, a full year later, she is trying to get back at it. She has walked three days in a row, and just yesterday Emylee did her first Peloton bike ride in months. After eight minutes in, she felt like she couldn’t do it, but she kept going. But this isn’t what we are going to be talking about today. We are super excited because it’s been a while since we have done an episode like this, where we share a small tweak we made inside our signature program that was uber effective.

It actually kind of blew us away just how much of a difference it made. It's been almost a year since we made this two-phased change. We want to talk to you about it today because if you are offering services or packages and there are deliverables inside those packages that don’t cost you any money but do cost you time, those are sometimes the easiest things to add into a package to add value. There are also instances where you need to re-evaluate what those deliverables are and whether that thing is actually effective, not only for you but your clients as well.

We always knew there would be this moment where, after doing these profit reports, we would eventually hit our goal, and then we would have to have the conversation about what’s next for us. We alluded to it a bit last month, where we had our first loss in over a year, but no part of Abagail was concerned. It sounds bizarre, but we really stuck things out, made some subtle shifts, and March went fantastically. What a concept! We had a loss and didn’t let it linger in our brains for months on end, which, in turn, would have impacted our business for months on end.

Instead, we did a turnaround and saw some amazing stuff happen for us in March. It's funny because it’s not like we did this massive launch or any other big things. We just checked the calendar right before we recorded this to remind ourselves of what happened last month. We planned some stuff; we talked about some stuff; we did a mini-thing, well, someone else did a mini-thing; we invested in some stuff. That's about it! It was lowkey in terms of what was happening behind the scenes. But so much of what we have been doing over the last year has been about building our monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

When you start the hiring process it can be a challenging time with a lot to think about. There are a lot of decisions to be made about how or why you hire someone at a certain point in your business. We have talked about it in the past but today we want to talk about why it is important that you think first about how and where you will get a return on your hire rather than hiring to save time. This is because we know what hiring to save time looks like and we are in a different space to be able to talk about it. So many people only hire to save time and they should be thinking about it in a bigger way.

We want to have this conversation coming from the space of how we think about it now with Boss Project and lessons we have learned, but also there are one-off hires that Emylee has done for her earring business. She hired for stuff she knew she would save a ton of time on. She also wasn’t the best one to do these tasks and if they were done, she would make money faster. So it is interesting how this question of hiring can be viewed in different scopes based on where you are at in your business.

Hello friends! It has been a minute since we have talked about the other businesses we run. We thought it was high time for a little update because Abagail has something new and exciting that she has launched (by the time you hear this it will have been out for a minute). We are going to talk about that but we also think there have been some decisions that we have made very intentionally in our side businesses that we want to break down the logistics behind.

We share these things with you, first of all, because it is fun to chat about, but it is also fair for you guys to hear this part of the process because it gives you a look behind the curtain of something new and growing. It also shows you the reality of how a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners are, which is multi-passionate!

This is another one of those episodes where Abagail puts Emylee on the spot in front of the audience. She knows nothing and is expected to come up with something out of thin air. For context, we started our business as creative entrepreneurs and designers and all that. What we did not realize we were doing at the time was influencing people. We started this blog, we were putting out content, and ultimately, a large portion of our business has become what we would call affiliate marketing. It makes up a big percentage of what we are doing. So, Abagail has all this background knowledge of what it takes to be an influencer in an affiliate capacity and has made all of these pivots with her second brand to broaden the ways she is bringing in money for this brand. Emylee is admittedly the laziest influencer out there. It is not that she doesn’t influence people; she definitely does, and there are many examples to prove it. In technical terms, Abagail, based on the size of her audience, would be seen as a micro-influencer. There are so many people out there that want to be influencers but they don’t necessarily know what they need to be looking out for. There are some alarming things brands are starting to include in their contracts, and micro-influencers are agreeing to these things, most probably without any idea of what they actually mean. And they could not only negatively impact your business, but they could destroy your online reputation if you do not pay attention to what is going on.

We feel like the anniversary of the global pandemic that is quickly approaching is hitting us really hard! We just want to remind all of you business owners out there that you have been running a business for the last year in the midst of one of the craziest years any of us will ever go through, especially as a collective. For us, running a business in the midst of all this has been the most surprising thing that has ever happened, because March 2020 was the most afraid we have ever been about the future of our business. A year later though, we are now more confident than ever that we will continue to grow!

We have spoken a lot about the different areas of our business that we have invested in and how they change over time. We want to spend today’s profit report for February talking about how these decisions have ultimately affected our profit and how we are looking at this side of things. We want to talk about why things are just incredibly different now than they were last year and the place of greater maturity at which we have arrived with regards to the way we cope with the supposed ups and downs.

It's 2021, and we are diving into our profit reports. If you are new to this segment of the show, we really like to dive deep into what it takes to run an online business while avoiding comparison and not having to question your every move. So, instead of sharing dollars and cents, we share percentages, and we share strategies. We also dive into sharing behind-the-scenes thoughts and actions so you can see what makes sense for you without having to worry about whether you are in the right place and questioning where you’re at.

We have a good accompanying episode to this one, where we break down the strategies we are trying to tackle for this quarter, and more specifically, we break down the accompanying expenses to those strategies. So if you want to hear more about them, definitely listen to that episode too. Now, without further ado, let’s dive into today’s profit report.

Okay, we are finally here for the episode we have said we were going to give you. Today we are going to share a sneak peek behind the scenes of what we are doing and what we are focussing on for Q1, including not just big projects, but also some exciting shifts we’ve had in our team! If you have been following us for any length of time, you know we do a big planning dream-dump and break down our quarters into these “sexy chunks,” as we refer to them.

Historically speaking, Q1 has always been a time for us to reevaluate and to really clean up and optimize our existing systems. That’s worked for us because, in terms of outside obligations, we are home the most in Q1. We also have the least going on with others in our business and we can really focus on what’s going on internally. It’s a great time to hole in and not go anywhere, especially because it’s the worst part of winter. So when we have no choice but to be cooped up inside, we use it as an opportunity to perfect everything for the rest of their year so that when spring blooms, we can come out of our shells ready and prepared. Join us today and get the three-step blueprint to our 2021 Q1 masterplan.

Hey friends, so we are putting an introduction on the top of this episode because we had every intention to talk about all of our plans for Q1 and the cool, exciting stuff that we are trying, the people we recently hired, and the strategies we are starting. And then, somehow, we got down a rabbit hole of intuitive business ownership, contentment, our problem with happiness, and everything in between!

So we are going to save our episode about Q1 for another time, and what you are hearing today is slightly different than what you think you might be getting ready to hear! But it is still a really good episode, so stay until the very end. We also have a disclaimer that relates to a lot of what we say today at the very end, so you need to stay till then to hear it!

2020 feels a bit like a lifetime ago, even though we are only a few weeks into January. Even though we projected and gave you some ideas of where we might land, we are still so surprised with how last year ended up going for us. For all of us, 2020 will be a standout year for good and bad reasons. For us, it was ridiculous how our business year ended up. When big things happen in the world, you don’t know how they’re going to impact you, your partner, your family, your business, the climate, and the people buying your product. Everything.

Being in charge of how you make money is sometimes scary when you can’t control all of those scenarios. So, we are so thankful that we had the time and space in January 2020 to set the expectations of what we wanted to do, and more importantly, what we didn’t want to do for the year. This really helped because when shit hit the fan (and continued to hit the fan throughout the year), we were really focused on securing our foundation. And, in December 2020, this is what caught us.

We get a million DMs from people saying they are ready to strike out on their own and telling us they will listen and start with services. If you have been listening for some time now, you will know just how much we believe in service-based businesses. But before you do anything, as always, we recommend you listen to our second episode, back in 2017, the year we launched the show, where we had Abagail on as a guest.

In that episode, Emylee interviewed her to find out how she replaced her corporate income after getting laid off. Since we reference that episode a billion times, we thought it would be fun to do a 2021 version, where we find out how Abagail would handle the same situation today. Some of the things might be similar, but what are the new strategies Abagail would leverage now? Technology and marketing have changed so much that there are sure to be a few new ways to bounce back quicker.

Welcome to our 500th episode! That means we have spoken on air for 22,500 minutes or 16 days, and we are not going anywhere anytime soon. For us, there is no shortage of things to say about business, life, and everything in between. We could talk for 500 more episodes on all of these things! Today's show will be a smorgasbord of us talking about our memories, favorite highlights, not just of the show, but being in business in general. We discuss some of the cool things the show has done for us, our best episodes, and everything in between. We are so proud we have made it to 500, and with no plans of slowing down anytime soon, you don’t have to worry about not hearing our beautiful voices. We have had so much fun and are so grateful that we continued with the podcast despite the ebbs and flows of running a business. Often creative projects fall by the wayside, but this podcast has stayed steady for three years, and we could not be prouder. We are not sure how we kept it going for so long when other things, like our blog, got cut after some time. While we are back blogging once a week, this podcast has been the one constant alongside our business.