Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth

In today’s episode, I am going to be talking about what it looks like to budget when your income is inconsistent. Perhaps your business’ revenue and your pay is inconsistent and you want to create more sustainability across the board so that you can get paid more often and more predictably. I know the economy is insane at the moment and there is a lot happening right now so everything I am going to share with you today is what I would do when I want to have a more conservative approach in a time of uncertainty. I know that this will have an instrumental impact on how you change your business’ finances, create more personal financial stability, and solidify the future health of your business. I need you to get the idea out of your head that businesses grow linearly or exponentially. They just don’t and you need to embrace these waves of inconsistency. I don’t want you to think that this sort of change means you’re doing something wrong because that isn’t true and running a business is simply too unpredictable. I want to help you find ways to manage these waves of inconsistency. I have been through periods of making huge amounts of money and periods of not even making enough to cover my family’s groceries for the month. In the first few years of running my business, I would take every dollar that would come into the business and use a percentage of it in a certain way, so I got paid when the business got paid. The problem with this is that it is very inconsistent and while it may work early on in the business as the most stable way to handle finances, it won’t work in the long run. In your developmental years, you need a place to start because those dollars don’t always fall linearly even when you’re doing fantastically! While there are definitely things that you can be doing to create consistency in revenue, that’s not actually what I am going to be talking about today. I am going to be talking about creating consistency in your income and your pay; the money that goes into your personal bank account. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about taking every bump out of your business because bumps will happen! This is about creating predictability in your personal financial future and helping you save appropriately so that you can manage the unpredictability that will inevitably come.Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m sharing an incredibly personal story about a crisis I faced in 2022 and the profoundly transformative impact it’s had on my life. Clocking that I was the same age as my mother when he had her brain surgery 30 years ago triggered a deep existential crisis in me and in this episode, I open up about my personal journey of self-reflection. With the insights and exercises I learned along the way, I’m eager to provide you with the tools to move through your own transformation. Out of necessity, I’ve become well-acquainted with what it looks like to truly reflect deeply, and I want to share my process so that you, too, can understand what's important to you and learn how to prioritize it going forward. Feel free to treat this episode as your compass to navigate the uncertain waters of self-discovery!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking all things Barbie; specifically, the marketing budget which is the biggest marketing budget we have seen for a movie in a long time! This company has taken a brand we all know and love and made it more relevant decades later. So what will this massive budget mean for entertainment moving forward and what can we learn from it as small businesses? The Barbie movie team spent $150 million on marketing on top of the $145 million they spent on the actual production, and the ROI is there, as the production already made the entire amount back in the first weekend alone! There are hundreds of collaborations, and this is absolutely incredible! There have recently been loads of discussions about the profitability of femininity, and any nay-sayers have been proven wrong time and time again. Amazing things happen when women are supported; this movie is more proof!There has been a very interesting shift in toys recently, and Barbie has seen some controversy for not being diverse and inclusive enough, representing enough of a variety of jobs, and being body positive. This movie helps us remember what Barbie felt like when we were children, before all of this stuff mattered to us! This age-old brand has the heart of many women, and the movie, which was produced for millennial women and not children, reawakens this nostalgia. The movie is even fairly satirical and makes fun of the Barbie world in many ways. There is a lot of power in looking at totally different industries from your own to find things you can learn from!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it just us, or have you also noticed the major shake-ups that have been taking place in the social media space recently? From Threads to TikTok Shop to the Twitter rebrand, we’re taking a deep dive into some of the wild stuff that’s been going on in this episode!We’ve been following things very closely and, from our perspective, more has happened in the month of July 2023 than in the last three years! So, we decided that now is the time to catch you up on all the developments on social and the impact that these changes are likely to have on your small business. We know change can be challenging, but trust us. If you embrace it, it can do wonders for your business!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quitting corporate and striking out on your own can be a daunting task. But with the right preparation and strategies, you can build the business you’ve always wanted without feeling totally overwhelmed. Today on the show, I share the story of how I quit corporate and started my own business in 2015 and how I would go about doing it again in 2023.Back in 2015, the online landscape was totally different, and starting your own company had far more barriers to entry than it does today. In the intervening years, technological advances have made it easier than ever to earn money online and organize your systems. While it’s wonderful that these tools have made starting a business more accessible, it also means that it can be more difficult to get your name out there. Tune in for a breakdown of my journey, the lessons I’ve learned along the way, and a rundown of my advice for anyone looking to quit corporate and set out on their own in 2023!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do grief and grit mean for women who are balancing life and business? Sometimes, experiencing enormous hurt and pain turns you into the most authentic version of yourself. The topic of grief is incredibly personal and important to me because it is one of the primary reasons for my growth and success. Grief is equally as frustrating and painful as it is beautiful, hopeful, and inspirational. In simple terms, grief is the ultimate shapeshifter! There is no right or wrong way to grieve as it impacts everyone differently. Today, I want to share some of my own experiences with grief before diving into how you can turn your grief into grit in both your personal life and your business!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boss Project is going through its biggest transition yet! For the last 24 months, Abagail has been almost exclusively in the finance and sales side of the company. She’s been creating spreadsheets, thinking about company benefits, sales processes, hiring, HR, and more. That has meant she’s been out of the marketing game. She simply hasn’t been thinking about social media and sales funnels for two years and she’s excited to dive back in! You can expect experimentation as she gets her feet wet; trying and testing different things. It’s going to be focused, it’s going to be intentional, and it’s definitely going to be fun!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Abagail interviews our very own Emylee to talk about her shift into full-time authorship, what she has learned thus far from her rapid transition into this new field, and the leap of faith it took to pursue her passion! If you missed out on parts one and two of this series, we encourage you to go back and give those a listen so that you’re all caught up for this latest conversation.While we are sad to see Emylee leave her role as Co-CEO of Boss Project, we are so excited to see her embarking on this next chapter as she pursues her passions. Tune in as we talk about Emylee’s journey as an author, how she’s been navigating the writing process, and what it’s been like going from a partnership to working solo!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we look back at the last eight years and celebrate all that Boss Project has accomplished! We’re sharing our journey as business partners, what it’s been like to work together, and some pearls of wisdom we’ve picked up along the way. Let’s dive into how we got here! If you missed Part One of our four-part series, then you must go back and listen immediately! There are details and nuances that are going to be noticeably absent if you don’t go back and listen to that first episode first.Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here at Boss Project, we’ve had some pretty big changes happening offstage in a surprisingly short amount of time! Today, we’ll be chatting about these changes, how we’re navigating them, and what you can expect from Boss Project going forward.Tuning in, you’ll hear some pretty big news along with our thoughts on what we’ve learned from adjusting to these new developments and an overview of our upcoming four-part series. While periods of transition can be intimidating, they can also be incredibly exciting. This may all be happening a lot faster than we expected, but we have full confidence in our plans going forward and we invite you all to be a part of it!Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate, and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes, go to thestrategyhour.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices