Engineering Calmer Agencies & Consulting Firms: Calm is the New KPI

Are you creating space for growth in your business?You might be measuring every metric–collecting every piece of data and then turning it into a strategy for growth–but do you have the operational foundations to be able to handle growth? Does your team have the capacity to take on more work?In the last 2 episodes–episode 20, episode 21–I talked about two different approaches to collecting data about your business. I talked about the numbers and the nuances, and what to do with that information once you've got it. Today, we're going to take a different approach, get a little bit woo, and talk about creating the space in your business for growth. I'm talking to Kathleen Shannon, the co-founder and creative director at Braid Creative, co-host of the Being Boss Podcast, and co-author of the Being Boss book. I talk with Kathleen about how to approach data when you identify as more of a creative person and less as someone with a data-first mindset. We talk about how making space for growth is such an important aspect of actually growing. And we talk about how sometimes making space for growth can just mean letting the universe know you're prepared.Listen to the full episode to hear:What work you can do as a founder to personally prepare to manage a larger businessHow to know if your business is actually ready to grow and how to make space for that growthHow Kathleen's chalkboard method is a great tool for making sure you are intentionally creating the space to growHow you can use metrics to get a big impact even if you're not a "data" personAnd how to grow while still serving the (smaller) clients you love working withLinks:Braid CreativeBeing Boss PodcastBeing Boss BookKathleen on Instagram Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanbolesTo schedule your free consultation with Susan Click Here.  Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

It’s easy to get caught up in all the numbers you can track to measure growth.You might be measuring your time, your profit & loss, the number of new clients closed, or even profit per hour per client like we talked about in the last episode.But not all of the useful information in your business presents itself as a number. When it comes to measuring the more murky, squishy, qualitative information in your business, where do you even begin?There's a lot of information rolling around in there that's helpful to measure, but you can’t track it in the same way you track your numbers.For instance, conversations with customers can give you an incredible amount of information about how your business is performing, what your opportunities are, and where you need to address weak spots.So, how do you measure how your customer feels about your service? What's happening when they reach out to you? What do they think you do versus what you think you do? All of that information comes in handy when you're trying to update your messaging, write your copy, or just simply figure out how to improve your customer service. It's crucial data floating around out there that you can use to measure and optimize for growth.But how?My guest today does just that. Karyn Kelbaugh is a squishy data specialist. She helps small business owners learn what their clients think by capturing their stories. Owners get feedback, insights into their clients' dreams and frustrations, and their exact words describing it all. In other words: research you can use. Listen to the full episode to hear:How Karyn collects all that squishy data goodness and gets it into a useable form that's easy to keep up to dateHow frequently you should be looking at the data, what should they be looking for, and how should you use that data to drive decisionsHow actively collecting your clients’ perspectives helps paint a more accurate picture of what's really going on with your business and how to integrate that perspective in a meaningful wayHow one of the biggest mistakes you can make is collecting data you don't have a purpose for Links:heykaryn.comThe Testimonial ToolkitKaryn on InstagramKatyn on FacebookKaryn on LinkedIn Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Is there one metric you could track that would ensure the success of your business?A lot of startups would like to think so. Some call it the “One Metric That Matters,” or the “North Star Metric.”It’s basically the idea that you focus on measuring and improving one thing at a time. By focusing on a single thing, you can filter for decision making and ensure that the actions you're taking in your business are actions that will truly make an impact.The problem is that what you track has a huge impact on the action you take. Choose the wrong metric and you can sink the sustainability or profitability of your business.So whatever your one metric to rule them all is, it better represent what you truly want to get out of your business.This month we're kicking off a series all about measuring growth. What do you measure? How do you track it? What do you do with the data once you have it?My guest today is a master at this.You might remember Rob Howard from Episode 9, where we talked about streamlining the proposal process. Rob owns a web development agency, Howard Development & Consulting, and runs a course for freelancers called Automatic Freelancer. He has one simple metric for measuring the financial health of his business: profit per hour per client. Tracking that metric has changed how I evaluated and measured my own business and has become something I incorporate into my clients’ businesses as well. It's not something you have to look at every day, but keeping track of this one metric will help you grow in a sustainable and financially healthy way. Listen to the full episode to hear:What Rob considers to be the key metrics to measure for service business owners and how he determined which metric to measure the financial health of a business What's happening behind the scenes for Rob to actually get to this profit per hour per clientHow the number of dollars you made and the number of minutes you spent are data points where there is enough quantity to make real decisions based on themWhat tools Rob is using to collect data or measure his metricsWhat metrics he has consciously chosen not to track or pay attention to and some of the mistakes he has made with tracking metricsLinks:Howard Development & ConsultingAutomatic FreelancerThe 30 Minute Profitable Proposal System Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

How you choose to price your services and accept payments is one of those business design choices that we don’t always make conscious choices about. But it is a choice that can have a profound impact on your business and how it feels to run it. It just simplifies everything: from your team composition to how you work to even what project management software you use.We’ve been talking this month about the operational benefits of value-based pricing and upfront payments, taking a close look at how those choices can make your service business way easier to run. Examining your default decisions about pricing and payments and considering making different choices can really pay off, both in administrative streamlining, but also in your wallet. Today, we’re going to pull all those ideas together and look at the downstream impacts of making that switch from hourly pricing to value-based pricing. We’ll look at how it affects your sales process, your proposal process, your profit, your cash flow and, yep, even the other software you might choose to use in your business. To illustrate my point, we’re going to look at how these decisions have played out in a real business.My guest today is Rita Barry, the founder of Rita Barry & Co, a relationship-driven company, focused on metrics. Listen to the full episode to hear:Why tying your work to an hourly rate can really start to hurt as you gain efficiency and experienceWhy she uses results as the basis for her pricing structure and why pattern recognition has become one of her most valuable skillsHow value-based pricing allowed her to scale her agency without having to step away from doing what she lovedWhy making the switch to value-based pricing helped her find more joy in what she does! Links:Rita Barry & CoRita Barry on Instagram Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Getting paid more for your work, up-front, and without the hassle of tracking your billable hours or issuing invoice after invoice sounds like a dream scenario.But how exactly do you make that happen?Luckily, like so many other aspects of making a service business more efficient: there’s an app for that!In our last few episodes, we’ve talked about some business design choices with pricing and payments. How switching to a value-based pricing model allows you to charge upfront. And being able to charge your clients upfront or automatically, can eliminate a big chunk of your internal workflow. Today, we’ll talk about software that can help you pull all those pieces together. Once you’ve switched to value-based pricing, this is a tool that can help automate the process of onboarding your clients and taking payments, Practice Ignition. Practice Ignition is a software tool that does contracts and accepts payments, including recurring payments. The way it works is that you can load a library of services -- basically a library full of templates for each item or service you’d charge a client for, and a library of terms or your standard contract language. Once you have those two set up, you can create a proposal for a new client by just adding the services you want to sell them by picking them out of your library and adding them to your proposal, choosing how you want them to pay you, and then send the proposal along to your client, with a personalized message. It all takes about 5 minutes.Practice Ignition is a tool I use in my own business, and with most of my clients because it makes onboarding a client and accepting payments so easy.My guest today has been using Practice Ignition for the last few years. Jaime Campbell is the co-founder and CFO of Tier One Services,  a firm of outsourced, year-round CFOs and complete accounting departments. Listen to the episode to hear: How she transitioned her firm from Bill.com and Microsoft Word contracts to Practice IgnitionWhy that move impacted her workflow and ability to scale her firm so dramaticallyBehind-the-scenes of how I’ve built Practice Ignition into my own workflow at ScaleSparkSome live consulting with Jaime about how she could improve her own workflowLinks:Tier One ServicesPractice IgnitionFacebook Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Getting paid by clients is the #1 most important part of the workflow in a service business. If you don’t get paid, eventually, you won’t have a business. But how you go about getting paid – now that’s where some magic can really happen. In our last episode, we talked with Dana Kaye about transitioning from hourly to value-based pricing. The choice to make that switch to value-based pricing then allows you to the next logical step – making your client payments easier. Today, we’re going to talk with Kate Strathmann about the process of getting paid by your clients and how to make it easier. Should you accept credit cards? How about checks? Do you charge your clients the credit card processing fee? What about payment plans – should you offer them? How you decide to answer these questions can affect not just your workflow, but also your cash flow, and, ultimately, your relationship with your client. Kate Strathmann is the founder of Wanderwell Consulting, a business consulting and bookkeeping practice. And for Kate, taking payments is an opportunity to reinforce a positive, transparent relationship with her clients. It’s a client touchpoint that she’s particularly thoughtful about. We’ll talk about the basics – what kind of payments to accept, and when to ask for payments – but also how to think about offering payment plans in a whole new way. Listen to the full episode to hear:How Wanderwell Consulting’s pricing and the payment mechanisms are designed to ultimately support the relationship they are cultivating with their clientsHow offering multiple payment options and moving to a prepaid system has lead to the ability to automate paymentsKate's position on different payment methods–credit cards vs. bank transfers vs. checksHow being able to charge upfront and automatically has impacted the operational capacity, and administration of the businessAnd some of the common practices of online service business that Kate wishes would just become a thing of the pastLinks:Wanderwell ConsultingInstagram: @_wanderwell_ Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Switching from charging by the hour to a value-based or flat rate model can dramatically improve your workflow.Value-based pricing is a great way to boost profits and to keep your value separate from the hours you work. It allows you to charge your clients upfront, creating a business that is more efficient to run.Take the payment and go do the work. That's it. Most of the time, I'm not a big advocate of the whole “make one decision and it'll change your life and your business” idea, but this is different. Making the decision to use value-based pricing can literally change the way you do business.This is one simple financial decision that might revolutionize the way you run your business.All this month we'll be talking about what this transition looks like. We're going to talk about how value-based pricing can improve your workflow, how taking payment upfront means better cash flow, and how making the change means you might never again need to chase down another client for payment. We will also be covering some software tools you can use to make onboarding clients and taking payments as seamless as possible.Today, we're kicking things off by talking with publicist, brand manager, and Kaye Publicity Inc founder, Dana Kaye, who made the transition from an hourly pricing model to a value-based model about nine years ago. In this interview, Dana talks about how she went about making that transition. She talks about how the change affected every area of her business operations and gives us a great overview of the impact that thinking about the administrative costs of pricing your services can have on your business.Listen to the full episode to hear:What inspired Dana to make the transition to a flat-rate, value-based pricing modelHow she loves the story that the data tells and how it helps her make changes in her businessWhat kind of impact the change had on her sales, promotional, and client onboarding process How switching pricing models allowed her to productize her process in a way that every piece could then become its own defined and repeatable processAnd how the change has had a huge impact on Dana’s confidence as a business ownerLinks:Kaye Publicity Inc.Branding Outside the BoxInstagram Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Sometimes, when you get really specific about the one thing you do, client meetings become unnecessaryEven one-to-one services become unneeded when you've streamlined and productized your service.But how can you keep that high-touch, high-value feeling and still be ruthlessly streamlined behind the scenes?Today, we're talking about an evolution that moves almost completely away from client meetings altogether.My guest is Greg Hickman, the founder and CEO of System.ly. Greg and his team have over the last 4 years, transformed System.ly from a marketing automation consultancy into one of the top coaching and training companies for service providers. He realized that the systems he developed behind-the-scenes to streamline and productize his own service were actually much more valuable if he transformed them into a system that he could actually train his clients on.Instead of doing the work for his clients, he moved into a model where he teaches them how to do the service for themselves–a done WITH you kind of service. Basically, he realized that it's better for his clients if he teaches them to fish instead of doing them the fishing for them.Greg really demonstrates the power of turning your client delivery process into a product in itself. This is similar to what Parker Stevenson talked about in our last episode. Both of these approaches evolved based on providing the same service over and over to the same kinds of clients -- and taking the data from that to develop a service that is designed specifically for their clients, without those pesky meetings. After having examined so many different approaches to client communication, it seems like meetings aren’t inevitable, they aren’t required and, in fact, skipping meetings altogether might just make your service even better. Listen to the full episode to hear:Greg’s unique approach to managing or minimizing client meetings with what he calls the “hybrid agency”How to package and simplify your process so that the system is working in your favor, building a client journey with less energy, costs, and headachesHow he sets clear expectations and guidelines and believes that you need to train your clients to be good clients–equipping them to be successfulAnd what the challenges were transitioning from being a typical agency with the typical client meeting structure and project structure to this new, more guided experienceLinks:Website: System.lyPodcast: The AltAgency ShowScalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Monthly client meetings––they’re a requirement of service retainers.Or, are they?There's an expectation that if you're working with clients on retainer, in an ongoing, recurring way, that you have to have meetings––ya know, just to touch base.Conventional wisdom says that meetings should be included in the service because they seem to deliver inherent value. But meetings are a huge limitation when it comes to scaling a service business. There's only so much of you to go around. Is spending time in meetings really the best way to delivering great value and grow a business?Today, I got Parker Stevenson to weigh in. Parker is co-owner of Evolved Finance, a bookkeeping company that specializes in online businesses. By its very nature, the business of bookkeeping is doing pretty much the same thing month after month–making it a business that is ripe for scaling, if you approach scaling the way Evolved Finance has. One of the ways that Parker and his partner, Corey Whitaker, take advantage of this opportunity to scale is by bucking convention and delivering their monthly bookkeeping service without having regularly scheduled calls.In this episode:How Parker’s project to change the client-meeting paradigm has evolved over that last yearWhy niching down made it easier to build out operational practices How he shifted from using recorded Loom videos with his clients to experimenting with a training resource library and group office hoursHow getting to know his clients and their needs has been a better way to deliver value than getting mired in weeks of callsThe challenges Parker and his partner have run into transitioning from typical client meetings to group callsWhat kind of impact this move away from regular client calls has had on the business’s operational capacityHow quitting client meetings have impacted Parker personallyLinks:Website: evolvedfinance.comFacebook handle: facebook.com/evolvedfinanceFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/evolvedfinance/Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here

Client meetings can easily fill up your entire calendar–sucking away all of your available time. This time is a valuable asset and it is often the single most limiting factor to the growth of service-based businesses.So what if there was something you could do to reduce this time-suck?All this month on the show we are looking at alternatives–unique ways to communicate with clients and opt-out of meetings, email, and conventional communication methods.Today, we’re talking about using Voxer with clients. Primarily a voice messaging app that harkens back to the flip-phone days, Voxer allows you to send short voice recordings, replacing both email and in-person meetings.I’m going to talk to two different founders who use Voxer to communicate with their coaching clients. You’ll hear from Nancy Jane Smith, a professional counselor and therapeutic coach who uses Voxer as a better way to work with women with High Functioning Anxiety.And you will hear the second half of an interview that I started last week with Ashley Gartland, a business coach who uses Voxer to save time, boost profit, and nurture exceptional ongoing client experience.Throughout this episode, pay close attention to how Voxer not only helps save time by opting out of meetings but also streamlines the way your clients receive value.In this episode:How Ashley & Nancy are using Voxer in managing and minimizing client meetingsHow they are using Voxer so the technology doesn’t become a distractionWhat the boundaries and processes they’ve put in place so clients know what to expectWhat challenges they have run into transitioning from a typical client meeting structureWhat impact the new approach have on their operational capacityLinks:VoxerBreak the Ceiling Episode 12Ashley Gartland:The Simplified Intensive  FacebookInstagramLinkedInNancy Jane Smith:Live HappierInstagramFacebookLinkedInThe Happier Approach BookSusan Boles:Scalespark Dollars + Decisions RoundtableTwitter @ScaleSparkLinkedIn @thesusanboles Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here