Susan Boles

Marie and I talk about consistency and how critical it was to her success with Notion and her course and community Notion Mastery. We also talk about how discovering she was neurodivergent explained so much about how her brain worked and has helped her figure out how to set up systems that work the way she does.

Failing sucks, there's no doubt about that. But those failures are a big part of what motivates me to teach financial skills and why I believe that your numbers tell you a story about what to do next in your business. Margo and I have both quit businesses. And in this interview that we originally recorded in September of 2019, we explore what it meant to quit and how we each realized it was time to let go.

If consistency is the goal, building habits is how you accomplish it. Sarah Von Bargen uses habits to make sure they're sticking to that purpose. Habits have been a critical component in her own business success and in the success of her students, too.

The point of maintenance mode is to give you time and space to take a REAL break. Not a vacation where you're checking your email or you're stuck on your laptop kind of break. But a real, genuine break. To go through the process to prepare for maintenance mode, build the systems, and then trust them to work and step away? That's what we're talking about today.

India started off her career as a model and bodybuilder and evolved that into an agency where she now leads a team. We talk about her evolution as a leader and how hiring and finding the right fit was critical to the growth of her agency and for her to be able to step back from doing all the things.

In order to get your business into maintenance mode–and build a stronger business while you're at it–you have to answer the question, "What if I'm not here?" Ideally, the answer is that nothing changes. Invoices still get sent on time, your products and services still get delivered, and the wheels on the bus keep going round and round. That's the goal of maintenance mode, to me.

While sales are one of the first things business owners seem to want to outsource, sales are probably one of the very last pieces of your business operations that you should be handing off to people. And that means that figuring out how to put sales on maintenance can be a challenge. And my friend, Allison Davis, is my go-to when it comes to sales and creating sustainable sales processes.

Consistency in your messaging means that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every quarter. It means you know what you need to say and you know to whom and how you need to say it. And it’s the first part of being able to prepare your business for maintenance mode.

Instead of shutting his business down and starting over when he realized that something needed to change for him, Mark Butler created a complementary business with a different business model–one that was designed for maintenance. Key Takeaways: - How Mark makes two very different business models work under one roof - Why his team is always empowered to tell him no - How side projects sustain his creativity and generate new opportunities for the business - Why every entrepreneur needs to ask themselves what they really want to be when they grow up

One of the biggest challenges of getting your business into maintenance mode is your mindset. HOW do I get out of my own way? HOW do I stop getting distracted by every new idea that pops into my head? How do I keep myself from breaking it? What am I supposed to DO all day if my business doesn’t need me to shop up and deliver? These are exactly the questions that Rachael Cook and I are answering today.

Finka Jerkovic was forced by burnout and exhaustion to re-assess her capacity as a founder Managing her own energy as a business owner has been crucial in making sure that she is building a business that is supporting her, building a business based on work that she truly LOVES to do.

When Anna ran up against her capacity ceiling, she decided that she loved the work she was doing and didn't really want to change the way that she was working. But that something still had to change.

What the journey from being a startup CEO to a maintenance style CEO has been like for somebody who thinks in systems and who is comfortable with consistency.

Most of us are creating businesses that tie us to a physical place and set hours. But oftentimes, the life we want to live doesn’t always align with the businesses we create. When I started ScaleSpark, I designed it from the ground up to be the kind of business that would give me the freedom and flexibility I wanted. I knew what my end game was so I built a business that reflected that. Today my guest, Ryan Lazanis, talk about how he did the same thing. Key Takeaways: - What Ryan learned from his first company about creating a scalable company that can operate on maintenance mode - The lessons he took with him from that first company and how it influenced how he built the second one - How Ryan reverse-engineered his business to revolve around his ideal life

For this episode, I wanted to figure out what maintenance mode means to different people and what it looks like in different kinds of businesses. I started asking podcast guests and people around me what maintenance mode meant to them and I never got the same answer twice.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been re-releasing episodes that are the best cuts from three of my very favorite Break The Ceiling Episodes. This week—and our last Best of Break The Ceiling—I'm revisiting my interview with Michelle Warner.

For the next three weeks, I'm going to re-release episodes that are the best cuts from three of my very favorite Break The Ceiling Episodes. This week, I'm revisiting my interview with Charlie Gilkey where we talked about how to get out of your own way and how to avoid roadblocks that you inevitably run up against.

For the next three weeks, I'm going to re-release episodes that are the best cuts from three of my very favorite Break The Ceiling Episodes. This week, I'm revisiting my interview with Justin Jackson, co-founder of transistor.fm, the company that hosts this podcast.

Social media is a major marketing channel for LOTS of small businesses, and it's an important part of the decision-making process if you're thinking about your own marketing from a perspective of privacy, so I wanted to bring on someone who did go through this evaluation process and implemented their OWN experiment. Key Takeaways: - How Nathalie made the decision to drop the pixel and leave Instagram - What she does instead now and we talk about how to get real, actionable data while still respecting people's privacy AND holding true to her own desire not to support Facebook as a company. - The projects and ideas that I'm still working on implementing for ScaleSpark when it comes to digital privacy

Kim has been instrumental in helping me execute my privacy-focused marketing strategy and keeps me up to date on changes in the marketing and digital privacy world. Key Takeaways: - What Kim’s done for me behind-the-scenes at ScaleSpark - Behind the scenes of ScaleSpark's privacy-focused marketing experiment - Why SEO is the perfect strategy if you're concerned with data privacy in your own marketing - The big changes coming with Facebook and Instagram and data tracking that we should all know about