Welcome back to part three of our series on the four things every service provider must get right. In today’s installment, we’ll be delving into one of our favorite topics here at Boss Project: designing your systems for structure.

Most of our clients deliver a service that requires their clients' contribution. This means they usually need input from clients before they can take the next step in their process. Unfortunately, they often aren’t able to systematize a process because they’re spending most of their time and energy chasing people down all the time! In today’s episode we delve into how to create systems that support you, the impact it will have on your operations, and why it’s all about spending more time with your clients, not less!

We want to help you align the goals and values of your business with the systems you put in place. Our approach is all about how to create structure while taking into account the messiness of life, clients, and running a service-based business. Tune in today as we break down how to design your systems for structure and serve your clients to the best of your ability!

In part two of our series on the four things every service provider must get right, we’re talking about money! Particularly, we are talking about profitability. If you want a business that allows you to sleep and see your friends, and maybe even take a vacation, you need to be paying attention to the piece of your business that determines if your deliverables are profitable.

What does it take to really run your service fully? Can you identify what projects are bringing in the most profit for your business? Do you operationally know where you might have some of those ‘cherry on top’ niceties that you might be able to fund in a different or unique way?

At the end of the day, if you don’t have money to fund the business that you are running, you are not going to have a business to run. We want you to not only have a business to run, but we want your business to fund the life that you want to have, and that’s literally our whole mission over at Boss Project!

We are bringing you a series! It’s going to be a four-part series dropping on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next two weeks. In it, we’re going to be covering the four things that a service provider must get right. The reason why we’re launching this particular series is because we’re surprised, year after year, about the lack of higher-level resources geared towards the tens of thousands of people who listen to this show, namely established business owners who are looking to figure out their next move for their business, so that they can level up. So, we’re creating those foundational resources for you in the form of a podcast series. We’re so excited to dig in, come join us!

All of us, as service providers, need to be reminded of the importance of gauging whether we are, perhaps subconsciously, tying our personal identity and self-worth to what we bring to the table for our clients. There have been some conversations popping up recently in which very successful service providers have been wondering why certain clients are not listening to their every word or taking their professional advice. They are made to feel both frustrated and insecure, as they recognize the clients aren’t going to see the results they’re able to procure for them, simply because they refuse to adhere to the strategy. We, personally, are not immune to these thoughts, and today, we want to share our personal experience and some exercises to help you dispel imposter syndrome and communicate clearly and calmly with clients who won’t hear you out. It’s time to actively separate your self-worth from your work and quit taking on your clients’ “emergencies”!

Our very first absolute priority when it comes to our business values, is building a business that is life first. To us, that means that our business structure reflects the season we are in. Seasons can be short or long, but they are intentional choices. You can choose to work full time, build a business, and still respect life first.

What this looks like for us, is allowing ourselves plenty of flexibility even while working full-time hours. When we chose to do business this way, we structured our days in a way where we could still prioritize family and life over work. How it looks is not the point, how it is communicated, and how it is honored, are! Life first looks completely different in every different context - what our team looks like when we’re working, what our team looks like when we are not working. Open and early communication is the essential building block for a life-first business to thrive.

We’ve made it a rule that every single employee has to take both their birthday and their anniversary off from work. That’s just one example of how we’ve built the life-first value into our business, and we’re proud of it! Building a life-first business can look any way you want it to, and it can be the little things, and ultimately our goal is that you have the freedom to choose what you want to prioritize and how that works.

For those of you who have reached the point of hitting your first or second six figures and are beginning to tap out of what you personally do within your business, there’s a conversation that needs to be had. A lot of people decide to ditch their current offers for an entirely different set of offers because they think that’s the only way to move up, however, we think pricing is a great opportunity to expand. Oftentimes, the clients that work with us in the Incubator can work with fewer people and make more money, if they’re priced appropriately. But something we don’t see happening as much as it should, is people moving to a premium pricing model to set them up to grow their team. Tune in to discover how to grow your team ethically, calculate appropriate service pricing, and why you might be pricing inappropriately, to begin with!

Goal setting forms an integral part of any business. It serves as a guide for your overall vision and can help you persevere, especially when things get tough. But how do we choose our goals? And how do we fully recognize when we’ve obtained them? Too often, we’ve seen clients achieve incredible things only to find themselves unable to appreciate their accomplishments, simply because the reality doesn’t exactly match what they envisioned. This is why, today on the show, we are revisiting our conversation on goal setting and how to appreciate our accomplishments!

We dig into the forces that influence what we envision for ourselves, and how holding onto a particular resolution can undermine our current achievements. Learn how practicing gratitude with intention can help you appreciate your current circumstances and how shifting your perspective to your past self can make you thankful for all that you have! We also share what we learned from a recent interview with a Former FBI Hostage Negotiator about why humans are hardwired to focus on the negative and how to gain perspective. Uncovering what we truly want takes time and work and appreciating what we have takes gratitude and intention. Tune in as we delve into these important topics and the role they play in your life and business!

Coming your way today is a mix of math and anticipatory mindset work! It’s all through the lens of, “This is what you actually want.” We’re going to lay out the future a little bit for you so that you can start to understand what’s coming and that you can stop stressing about it! We’re seeing hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are constantly apologizing for doing things they don’t want to do. After today, we want you to understand why you shouldn’t be feeling bad about things like not posting consistently on social media, and what you should be putting energy into instead!

What would it look like to remove yourself from the parts of the business that you should remove yourself from? And which parts should you never remove yourself from? Are there opportunities you’re ignoring because of this?

When you give up these things, we can only imagine that, in your heart of hearts, you want to lean more into the CEO role - you just don’t know yet exactly what you’re supposed to be doing with that time. But once you know more about what’s required of you within that role, you might find the motivation to let go of these other parts of the business, and by doing so, gain some very precious time back!

Today, we’re going to fill you in on our hot take on setting goals! We are now seven years into our business and have hit tremendous milestones. That being said, our feelings towards goals have evolved over time, and we’re about to give you some insight into our retrospective thoughts on setting them, not setting them, and whether we feel worthiness is connected to goals. For six-figure earners who want to continue to scale their business, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen in terms of your relationship with goals, and we’re here to tell you what that is! Tune in to hear our current take on goal setting, and find out about the TikTok that inspired this conversation.

It’s taken us over a year to understand how our roles as co-CEOs of our company are different from the other aspects of our jobs and what exactly a CEO actually does. We’re still in the process of figuring out how to balance being CEOs, managers, and “doers” but we’re getting there! In this episode, we will be talking about what being a CEO entails, the tasks you should always be in control of, and those which you can delegate to other team members at a certain point along your journey.

Speaking to hundreds of people on a regular basis about their business has given us so much insight into which structures work for which industries. It’s what positions us to advise clients entering the incubator who find themselves at a fork in the road of how to move forward. We want to give you some guidance, and let you know what we would do if we were in your shoes.

None of these options are wrong, it’s all centered around what works best for you, what feels fun, and what facilitates you playing to your strengths. There are plenty of scenarios that work amazingly for some people, and don’t work at all for others. The question to focus on is not what is right, and what gets the greatest return, but what feels attainable for you. If something is not in step with who you are as a person, it’s not going to work!

This year, for the first time ever, Boss Project is taking a summer break! We’ve taken vacations in the past, and while we’ve navigated time off before, this time is different. This year we have a full staff of nine employees, who will all be taking time off, and the company will be closed for two entire weeks! In today’s episode, we walk you through the steps we’ve taken to prepare for our time off and show you how any business can prepare for a substantial and regenerative summer break.

Tuning in you’ll hear us break down how we’ve structured our work and our launches around designated time off, why we chose to do it this way, and what we’re planning to do for our break. We unpack some of the logistical steps we’re taking to maintain communication while we’re off, and why we wanted to prioritize our staff and give everyone a chance to rest and get away from it all. Thank you for joining us as we prepare for our summer break and discuss what it means to be a life-first business!

What does it mean to cultivate a culture of curiosity? That’s what we’re going to be discussing today! “Culture of curiosity” isn’t just a fun phrase. It starts with the way you talk about your work with all the people who are in your support system. It should be all-encompassing because if you use different language with different people it can derail you (in our opinion).

One of the very first switches that we made when we were first growing our team was to speak openly with our team members about the things that we used to only speak about during our private conversations. As soon as we started thinking out loud, and sharing our fears and excitement with the people around us, they could see the evolution in our thought patterns which is such a valuable and inclusive tool!

How many times have you struggled to make a decision in business out of fear that you’d make the wrong decision? What if instead, you viewed every decision as an opportunity to learn, rather than succeed or fail? Today on the show we unpack what it means to have an experimental mindset, how to foster that for yourself and within your team, and how it can free you from regret and help you make decisions that will help you learn and grow.

Tuning in you’ll get a taste of what we've been chatting about with our clients inside the incubator; from how unrealistic expectations can warp your mindset, to how to figure out what you really want. We’ve seen so many of our clients struggle to react to success and failure and as a result, we wanted to discuss examples of actionable strategies. Learn what you can implement within your company and your team so that if you're in a similar situation, you have strategies to help you adapt to any situation!