Susan Boles

Having project managers as a specific position on your team is a choice that can drive what your business looks like. It's a choice that can ultimately determine what your position as a founder looks like. Are you a manager of managers? Do you directly work with clients? It can mean a difference between running your business as a solopreneur or running your operation agency-style. Key Take-Aways: - How a project manager has been a critical role in the growth of Yellow House Media - How knowing whether or not you need a project manager depends on the kind of business you want to run - When a project manager IS a critical team member and when it might it not be - How to make plans to scale your team as you grow

Today we're going full-on geek and talking about project management software with two of my fellow project management software nerds. We're talking about why you would pick one particular software tool over another, the importance of making sure the software you pick works with your brain, and how to avoid sabotaging yourself with getting distracted by the latest shiny new tool. Key take-aways: - Different approaches to setting up our software and why we chose the particular software tool we did - Philosophies of picking out or recommending software - How constantly looking at new tools can result in self-sabotage - Things Marie and Layla are doing in Notion and ClickUp that have really changed how productive or focused they’re able to be - Strong systems create stability – something that we all can use right now

Hailey Thomas is the master at delighting her customers. You might remember Hailey from Episode 12, when she came on the show to talk about her Worktreat Intensives. Hailey is a business coach for online entrepreneurs and one of my very favorite friends to nerd out about project management with. Hailey comes to each of her clients with a deep appreciation for who they are as individuals. With Hailey, client experience is built into every touchpoint. So, when I was thinking about doing an episode about project management versus client management, she was absolutely the first person I thought of. Key Takeaways: - Building a personalized, white-glove client experience - Looking at the end-to-end experience - The different phases of a project are and how to approach managing sperate projects in different phases of the process - How Hailey’s Worktreat Intensives have been going – how the process has changed and evolved

My guest today is showing us how it's done. Lauren Caselli owns a strategic event planning and marketing firm. She coaches business and agency owners looking for more financial breathing room on how to institute rate raises and price their services appropriately – setting them up to earn more per client and feel in control of their business. Lauren and I chat about how all the craziness around coronavirus has affected her events business. We talk about how that's impacting her cash flow and her approach to her finances and how Lauren built some great financial processes into her business that are serving her well during this time. Key Takeaways: - How to handle cash flow during a worst-case scenario - How COVID-19 effects events businesses and how those effects trickle down to other agencies - How opportunities can reveal themselves in unconventional places - What kind of financial processes you can have in place to build resiliency

Justin and I talk about some of the key data that they measure at Transistor. We talk about how to track monthly recurring revenue and churn – two fabulous metrics you can look at when measuring the health of your business. And we talk about how their strategy of being profitable and maintaining margins gives them the latitude they need to carefully consider their growth instead of just jumping on the next wave that comes along. Key take-aways: - How to identify business opportunities and what to do about them when they come your way - How to build margins into your business - How to approach the analytics of podcasting - How paying attention to what part of your revenue comes from recurring versus one-time projects can be a great indicator of the health of your cash flow - Why Justin and his partner decided to share their numbers and why they decided to stop

Maggie Patterson and I talk about all the different things she's tracking, how she tracks them, and how she's integrated what she learns into her growth strategy. We also talk about how she gets over the mental hurdle of “but, I don't wanna” and gets herself to actually track data. Key takeaways: - What was happening in Maggie’s business that made them focus their energy on tracking lead generation and what the exponential impact of having solid information was over time - How Maggie proudly chooses to keep her process of data collection super low-tech and uses Airtable as one of her main tools - How collecting the data gave them a taste for the numbers, taking them to next level nerd territory - How granular time tracking allows Maggie to make better decisions and to delegate things in a more informed way - And how having the data helps remove worry and anxiety related to the business because she’s able to see what’s really happening to make a reasonable decision based on facts and not on emotion

I talk with Kathleen Shannon 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. Key takeaways: - What work you can do as a founder to personally prepare to manage a larger business - How to know if your business is actually ready to grow and how to make space for that growth - How Kathleen's chalkboard method is a great tool for making sure you are intentionally creating the space to grow - How you can use metrics to get a big impact even if you're not a "data" person - And how to grow while still serving the (smaller) clients you love working with

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. Key takeaways: - How Karyn collects all that squishy data goodness and gets it into a useable form that's easy to keep up to date - How frequently you should be looking at the data, what should they be looking for, and how should you use that data to drive decisions - How 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 way - How one of the biggest mistakes you can make is collecting data you don't have a purpose for

Rob Howard 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. Key Takeaways: - 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 client - How 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 them - What tools Rob is using to collect data or measure his metrics - What metrics he has consciously chosen not to track or pay attention to and some of the mistakes he has made with tracking metrics

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. Key Takeaways: - Why tying your work to an hourly rate can really start to hurt as you gain efficiency and experience - Why she uses results as the basis for her pricing structure and why pattern recognition has become one of her most valuable skills - How value-based pricing allowed her to scale her agency without having to step away from doing what she loved - Why making the switch to value-based pricing helped her find more joy in what she does!

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. Key takeaways: - How Jamie transitioned her firm from Bill.com and Microsoft Word contracts to Practice Ignition - Why that move impacted her workflow and ability to scale her firm so dramatically - Behind-the-scenes of how I’ve built Practice Ignition into my own workflow at ScaleSpark - Some live consulting with Jaime about how she could improve her own workflow

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. Today, we’re talking 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. Key takeaways: - How Wanderwell’s pricing and the payment mechanisms are designed to ultimately support the relationship they are cultivating with their clients - How offering multiple payment options and moving to a prepaid system has lead to the ability to automate payments - Kate's position on different payment methods–credit cards vs. bank transfers vs. checks - How being able to charge upfront and automatically has impacted the operational capacity, and administration of the business - And some of the common practices of online service business that Kate wishes would just become a thing of the past

Dana Kaye and I talk about how she went about making that transition from an hourly pricing model to a value-based model. We talk about how the change affected every area of her business operations and the impact that thinking about the administrative costs of pricing your services can have on your business. Key takeaways: - The inspiration to transition to a flat-rate, value-based pricing model - The story that data tells - The mpact on sales, promotional, and client onboarding processes - Productizing a process in a way that every piece becomes its own defined and repeatable process - Building confidence as a business owner

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. Greg 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. The key takeaways: - 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 headaches - How he sets clear expectations and guidelines and believes that you need to train your clients to be good clients–equipping them to be successful - And what the challenges were transitioning from being a typical agency with the typical client meeting structure and project structure to this new, more guided experience

Today, I talk to Parker Stevenson, co-owner of Evolved Finance, a bookkeeping company that specializes in online businesses. I talked with him about how he and his business partner, Corey Whitaker, buck convention and deliver their monthly bookkeeping service without having regularly scheduled calls. The key takeaways: - How Parker’s project to change the client-meeting paradigm has evolved over that last year - Niching down to make it easier to build out operational practices - Experimenting with a training resource library and group office hours - Getting to know clients and their needs as a better way to deliver value than getting mired in weeks of calls - The challenges of transitioning from typical client meetings to group calls - The impact that moving away from regular client calls has had on a business’s operational capacity

Today, I talked with Ashley Gartland and Nancy Jane Smith about how they use Voxer to communicate with their clients. Primarily a voice messaging app, Voxer allows them to replace both email and in-person meetings, helping them save time and streamline the way their clients receive value. The key takeaways: - Using Voxer in managing and minimizing client meetings - Using Voxer in a way that the technology doesn’t become a distraction - Putting in place boundaries and processes so clients know what to expect - The challenges of transitioning from a typical client meeting structure - The impact of the new approach on operational capacity

In today’s episode, I talk with business coach Ashley Gartland and marketing & operations project manager Hailey Thomas about their different approaches to delivering intensive-style offerings. You will hear that these different approaches might actually be more effective in delivering value to their clients than sitting through yet another meeting. The key takeaways: - Unique approaches to managing and minimizing client meetings - Adapting a six-month partnership program to a two-week coaching intensive - Offering 3-day work retreats to bang out most of a project in a weekend - Challenges of transitioning from a typical client meeting structure - The impact of the change on clients - The impact the on operational capacity

Jake Jorgovan focuses on productizing his service delivery so he can operate efficiently at scale. These productized services are built on solid processes, procedures, and standardized systems behind the scenes. They ensure that his clients get a consistent, high-quality experience–a core tenant of both of his businesses. The key takeaways: - The motivational and driving forces behind deciding to start a service business like Lead Cookie - The biggest operational hurdles were starting out - How starting Content Allies was different from starting Lead Cookie - The operational strategies Jake focused on to deliver high-touch services profitably - How these same strategy decisions made a big difference in how easy the business was to run

Lacey Sites uses a revenue-sharing pricing structure that allows her to scale her one-on-one coaching business without adding more clients all while still dramatically growing her profits. This unique model allows her to double down on her investment in each client, create pricing structures that build trust and longterm partnerships, and then, when their work with her pays off, reap the rewards. Key takeaways: - A unique pricing/compensation structure - The reason for the change to the revenue sharing structure - Challenges of transitioning from a typical pricing model - How revenue sharing has impacted clients - Keep working 1-1 with clients while still growing revenue - Impact on operational capacity

The crux of the proposal process is reducing your sales time. Rob has developed a system that allows him to give accurate quotes on the initial call and send out proposals within 15 minutes of getting off that call. It's a system that saves a ton of time, and dramatically increase his profit per hour without changing the deliverable he’s actually providing to clients. Key takeaways: - A production proposal system that sets you to make a quick and accurate decision. - Making it clear what you are selling and how much you are selling takes a lot of the stress out of selling. - Instilling greater confidence in your client. - Why profit per hour per client is the most important metric. - Developing the business owner mindset.