Today we are going to be sharing some thoughts and some hot takes about hiring! There are so many people out there saying all sorts of things that make our insides squirm, and we don’t want you to waste your time and effort on strategies that definitely do not work. We also got sucked into the sexiness of the idea of hiring duplicates of ourselves, so we speak from firsthand experience when we tell you that this is a BIG mistake!

When people get to the point where they know they need to bring on someone else, it’s usually because of one of two main reasons; either that they need to hire for a very specific role for their company, or they’re burning the candle at both ends and therefore if they hire “another me” they’ll be able to get twice as much work done, but if you keep listening you’ll understand why you should never hire another you!

When we first decided to take a workcation, there was no way of knowing just how beneficial it would be. We have always added in times to do planning sessions and pin down what we want, but what we have learned is that creating a dedicated time to make sure it happens is so, so important. The only way for our business to move forward in the past was for us to hop on the phone with one another, and brainstorm ideas. But as our roles have shifted, this hasn’t happened as often. That’s why we’ve carved out CEO time on our to-do list, to help us have the correct focus.

We’ve all spent so many years working for businesses that are not structured well, not managed well, and that took all the lessons we didn’t like and implemented them in the workplace. This is the extreme opposite of many of our efforts to create flexible environments that take into account all of our humanity. But what we’ve found is that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Not having boundaries or expectations doesn’t help anyone either!

To us, knowing that we had the time to think and brainstorm without boundaries, but also adding boundaries to make the follow-through inevitable, was everything! It’s so important to add enough momentum to make sure that you achieve what you’re hoping to achieve. When you take incremental steps, it doesn’t feel like you’re eating the whole pie at once! Our main takeaways from the experience were that there’s a difference between the conversations that are had within leadership and team meetings, and within the room where it’s just you and your business partner. It’s so important that this happens periodically for the good of the business. That’s the high-level stuff that moves everything forward. If you’re not ahead of your people, they’re not going to know where to go.

We’ve had a very special kick-off to 2022. Not only is our company expanding, but we are also making big shifts in our business and how we lead our teams. While hiring new team members has its challenges, it’s still been an incredibly exciting time. With our shift from contractors to full and part-time employees, we have had an unprecedented opportunity to intentionally build our team culture and empower our employees with a transfer of leadership to various departments!

Our growth as a company has also brought about a change in business needs, particularly when it comes to productivity and organizational systems. Tuning in you’ll learn about the new organizational system we’ve been working on and how it will elevate your offerings. If you’re a fan of what our previous offering Trello for Business brought to the industry, you’ll love what we have in store for you! To learn more about how we’ve been leveling up our leadership skills, as well as exclusive insights into our new offering, make sure you tune in today!

December 2021 may have been the busiest and most strategic December we’ve ever had on record! Although we only took three days off this month, which is a huge deviation from how we normally run things, we’re extremely excited about how all our planning and purpose in December has set us up for a great Q1 in 2022! While it was tough having such a busy December, it was all with very particular goals and intentions in mind.

So much of our decision-making came back to growing our organization and looking at new employees and the positions that need to be filled as we continue to grow and scale. We had a lot of hiring decisions in the works, which formed a big part of our top priorities in December, but they were all 100% worth it. Luckily, because of the way we set things up in December, Q1 of 2022 is set to be the most intentional Q1 we've ever had!

The new year is fast approaching, and with it comes excitement, planning, and a whole of strategizing! We want to take all the things that worked so well in 2021, and carry it over into 2022. One of the biggest changes we’ve experienced in the last 12 months, is taking on a host of new full-time employees and growing our team! Soon, our full-time employees will even outnumber our regular contractors! It’s been really exciting expanding our business family, and we’ve learned a lot in the process.

To prepare for 2022 we’ve brain dumped all our anxieties and aspirations for the coming year onto paper, and blocked out our calendar accordingly. This is the biggest team we’ve ever worked with and we’re excited to take a far more structured approach to scheduling time-off, holidays, and blackout days. We’re taking everything we’ve integrated into our lives about how we run our business and are passing it on to the team. To learn more about our trajectory for 2022 and how we’ll be growing our business, tune in today!

A year is a long time, and you forget some things that happened throughout the year. We consistently overestimate what we can accomplish in a short period of time, and dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. A lot can happen in a year! We’re taking a walk down memory lane to discuss the things that have happened throughout the year!

While we feel mostly like the same people, we’re coming from a different starting point at the end of 2021 than at the beginning. There’s some irony to the decisions we made this year. This year, we decided not to grow, but to maintain the business that we had. We needed a breather. Despite that being true, we grew topline revenue by nearly 20%. The lesson? We don’t give rest the credit it deserves! That period of rest was a lot more significant than we give it credit for and it prepared us for easily the busiest year we’ve ever had.

Welcome back to another profit report! We’re going back in time to talk about November 2021. We’ve been doing these profit reports for over two years, and we can’t believe how time has flown by! For those who are new to the profit report, in these episodes, we offer a breakdown of our strategies and decisions, as well as insights into how money moves around within a company like ours. It allows you to gain an informed perspective on what it looks like to grow a company of our size, and hear insider conversations about things like healthy profit margins and expenses.

Today, we talk about our launch in October and how it has affected our November profits, including recurring revenue from people who made purchases in October. We unpack some of the exciting changes we’ve made, particularly when it comes to budgeting and reimagining how we’re going to continue to grow and scale. You’ll also hear about why a lot of this comes down to hiring and how we make decisions around that based on projections of client needs and outcomes. Tune in for a detailed breakdown of our profit report, insights into our goals for next year, and why we are so excited to grow!

This week on the Strategy Hour podcast, we discuss how to create benefits that will attract top talent while also allowing your company to thrive. Running your business can often put you in situations where you have to compromise, but that doesn’t mean those compromises have to be permanent. Once you reach the point where you can take on new staff, you can begin to ask yourself what benefits you can offer versus what you want to offer. It won’t happen overnight, but setting out goals that build towards your vision for your company can be incredibly motivating!

Hiring new staff can come with a series of unanticipated costs outside of their salaries, like taxes and opening new 401K plans. While it may seem overwhelming at first, a little planning goes a long way. We’ve benefited greatly from having expert consultants advise us on how to take on new hires, from accountants to help us with cash flow, to HR’s advice on how to structure maternity leave and healthcare benefits. It’s been incredibly exciting entering this stage of our business, where we can grow our work community and set goals for how we can support our employees in every aspect of their lives! We fully believe that you are so much more than your job and your career, and we want to support all those elements from family, to friends, to health and alternative medicine.

We’ve been working on something exciting for a really long time and today’s episode exists to introduce you to our newest offering, which includes taking on clients for our business incubator! Our business was working. We could have successfully continued with our existing plan. Instead, we made an intentional move, looked at what we wanted to do, saw that the mission was the same as when we started, and then asked ourselves how we could achieve even more of that!

If you can focus less on what you want and more on the problem you are actively solving for your audience, the doors will open. Your business should take care of you, NOT drain you! We want you to know that where we are today is the result of having a full staff of people, an audience in the millions, and six whole years of hard work, which is why we are sharing some insight into our hiring process, the art of simmering, our desire to take on clients again, and so much more in our October profit report for 2021! Join us today!

In today’s episode, we gain a really interesting perspective on the topic of branding from Shaunda Head, an Atlanta-based brand strategist and digital marketer who helps women align ALL THE THINGS in their brand so that their brand message can impact more powerfully! We chat about Shaunda’s experience of building her expertise in corporate institutions and the challenges of the transition between that world and going out on her own. Shaunda also shares the process she went through to uncover who she really is, rather than who she was when she was working for someone else.

A lot of our clients are in the same position; you guys are highly skilled, you know your shit, and you can serve people in incredible ways, but figuring out how to do that outside of someone else’s umbrella can be what is holding you back. This episode will give you some amazing ideas on how to rebrand yourself so you can step into who you truly are, so make sure to join us today to learn more from the amazing Shaunda Head!

We recently brought in an amazing cohort of clients inside of the incubator. Throughout that process we’ve read hundreds of applications, and there are two sentences that we found as a recurring theme and desire within these applications which we really want to respond to. We’ve got a lot to say on this topic, and we feel very passionately about it, so get ready for the rant! People have this elusive idea that they want to earn a passive income. In other words, they want to earn money in their sleep.

There is a version of this that does exist, and we’ll happily share that with you, but passive income isn’t what you think it is. If you believe that if you’re not chasing passive income then you’re doing business wrong, you need to listen to this. The way passive income is framed in the online industry is toxic, and can cause you to miss out on so many great opportunities. We know that passive income sounds like a perfect scenario, but today you’ll hear why it’s really not all that cracked up to be!

There’s a massive problem that’s affecting our entire audience right now, and we have some seriously strong feelings about it, which you’re going to hear all about in today’s episode. Do you guys remember that show called Celebrity Deathmatch? That’s what we’re doing today, but we’ve got “serving” and “marketing” in the ring. We are furious on behalf of our clients because of how they have been manipulated into wasting so much of their time and money.

Today, we’re going on record to say that the business education industry is rampant with marketing pros trying to teach other people to be marketing minions instead of actually teaching foundational business concepts that don’t change. Marketing is in our blood, so we get the desire to do this, but marketing is not the key to success. Hear us out.

Put your socks on, pour a fresh cup of coffee and tune into this conversation with Parker Stevenson. If you’re a service provider who wants to make more and work less, today’s episode is for you! It’s not that we’re comparing one business model against the other, but rather, we’re considering an informed perspective on the 1:1 and 1:many approaches to business.

We’re taking it back to September! It feels weird, but we’re going to recap all of the amazing, incredible things that we did in the month of September so that you guys can get a little peek behind the curtains and get to understand what goes on in our brains and why we do the things we do. September was only last month, but it feels like a lifetime ago because we have been moving fast and furiously at team Boss Project.

This episode comes with a bit of a trigger warning. We're both feeling a bit nervous about this one, which has never happened before. It's based on the conversations that we have privately with each other when we see peers, clients, and students making the wrong assumptions about the topic that we're going to talk about today. We decided that we're doing a disservice by only having those conversations privately. What lights us up is to impact others and to change their lives and to have small business owners be financially and soulfully fulfilled, and to do that we feel that we have to share our take on this.

If this conversation doesn't apply to you, you can skip it. If you are already crushing it and your business is made up primarily of courses and digital products and you're thriving and meeting your financial goals, then this conversation isn't for you. However, if you started as a service-based business owner and have added on courses and digital products and you have struggled financially and stressed yourself out because of it, then this episode is most definitely for you!