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

As I have been talking with business owners about maintenance mode, they have consistently brought up burnout. That moment when they realized that they couldn't keep working the way they were working. Caring for a family member or realizing they were burnt out or trying to handle a load of virtual school with no child care for a year – they all encountered a recognition that their own personal cap...

How's your capacity feeling these days? Getting a lot done? Or, like me, have you been hitting that pandemic wall hard? Over the last few weeks, I've been exploring the idea of maintenance mode in business, and today I want to shift from exploring the IDEA of maintenance mode into more tactical applications. If YOU wanted to move your business into maintenance mode, or you wanted to focus on scali...

Visionary or Integrator? Startup or Maintenance CEO? In the world of business, there is no shortage of ways to categorize your leadership style and the way you operate. But maybe in the real world, it's not quite so distinct. I LOVE quizzes and personality tests and different ways of categorizing my personality, my skills, and how I think about things. Sometimes these assessments are genuinely use...

Sometimes it takes more than one try to really nail the execution of an idea. Creating scalable systems isn't necessarily intuitive and it runs counter to most of our narratives about how hustling hard and creating more is the path to success. I propose that the path to success is actually radical consistency. As I was looking around for guests for this series on maintenance mode, I started thinki...

I've been spending a lot of time this year thinking about capacity. A lot of the work I do focuses on helping clients streamline their operations to increase their capacity without increasing their costs or business complexity. ScaleSpark actually started as an outgrowth of me running businesses and holding a full-time job. We owned a guest ranch and a brick-and-mortar store while I worked full ti...

I’m working on some really cool updates for my course, Not Rocket Finance – releasing at the end of March! – so I’m going to take a very short break from releasing new episodes to give myself some breathing room to finish those updates. 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 l...

I’m working on some really cool updates for my course, Not Rocket Finance – releasing at the end of March! – so I’m going to take a very short break from releasing new episodes to give myself some breathing room to finish those updates. 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 revisit...

I’m working on some really cool updates for my course, Not Rocket Finance – releasing at the end of March! – so I’m going to take a very short break from releasing new episodes to give myself some breathing room to finish those updates. 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 revisit...

Have you thought about leaving Facebook? Or what would happen if you pulled your advertising and ditched the Facebook pixel? How are YOU getting feedback about whether or not your marketing efforts are "worth it"? All this month, I've been talking about digital privacy and online security and sharing how I researched and implemented a privacy-first marketing strategy for my business. So far, I’ve...

When I was first thinking about what privacy-focused marketing meant, I asked a few of my favorite marketing friends: if THEY were going to do privacy-focused marketing, what would they do? Universally, everyone came back with the answer of podcasting and SEO. Podcasting is one of the very few places in the world of media still without automatic digital ad insertions, for the most part. Also, podc...

This month on the podcast, I'm talking about privacy and security. Those are actually two different aspects of overall cybersecurity. I really love the definition of these two from the Fathom analytics blog about the difference between digital privacy and online security (I'll link to it in the show notes). It says: Digital privacy protects our personal information and data so that it's not unnece...

Last summer, I started really thinking about values. What values do I have that I want to make sure I'm building into the DNA of my business? When it came right down to it, I realized that my core value—the one I wanted to make sure lived in every essence of my business—was safety.   The work I do with clients requires trust and vulnerability. It’s intimate. Money is a touchy, uncomfortable subjec...

The choices we make about how to earn, save and spend our money all ultimately come down to how we think and feel about money - and work. And whether or not you're "successful" with your financial choices is all a matter of your perspective. That’s why understanding and thinking about how you define success has a lot to do with whether or not you're satisfied—or feel successful—with your finances....

I think there are three different stages when it comes to your business and your personal finances: pre-enough, enough, and post-enough. And at each stage, you'll have different priorities, weigh different choices, and view your world in very different ways. These definitions are mine and I think everyone will probably interpret the idea of pre-enough, enough, or post-enough in their own terms—but...

What's YOUR earliest memory of money? Mine is going with my parents to open my own bank account at our local credit union. A lot of our experiences with and stories around money come from our childhood: how we saw money handled and what we got told about money, to name a few. And that stuff sticks with you. All of us have a completely unique and individual relationship to money that's influenced b...

You're not a spreadsheet and you're not a calculator. You're a person with experiences, feelings, and history. But when most of us think about managing money, we think about it like it's math. We expect to make decisions about money like a calculator. But managing your money is actually more like figuring out psychology than math. Human beings don't make decisions like a calculator. We make decisi...

What if you could change the way you price your services and double your revenue without bringing on any new clients or changing anything about HOW you work with your clients? Oh, yes, it’s possible! Sometimes, just switching up how you're pricing your services can have a dramatic effect on your overall profitability—and I don't just mean raising your prices—but reimagining how those prices are st...

Imagine your ideal way of working with a client. For me, it's working ALL in on a single project. I'm someone who likes going 100% or 0%. I'm either all in or I want to shut my brain completely off. What does it look like for you? This month, we've been talking about creative offerings and pricing strategies this month and thinking generally about how we offer and price our services. I talked to K...

When you think about the relationships you build with your clients, what does that look like? Are you setting it up from the very first touchpoint to be a long-term relationship? Or do you approach it as a one-and-done kind of thing? Neither is better than the other—but your business values influence your business model, rippling out into how you build relationships, do your work, and create your...

What kinds of changes are you thinking about for next year? Are you making a pivot? Focusing on taking a break? Diving deep into improving at your craft? Maybe you're thinking about raising your prices? One of the changes that you might be considering is a shift in your business model, or how you package your services—or even how you price them. The decision about how to price, package, or accept...

On the podcast lately, we've been talking about how to manage change, how to become more resilient, and how to develop our skills in these areas—both personally and as leaders—so that our businesses can weather storms and so our team can stay calm, relaxed and supported. I talked to Elatia Abate in Episode 54 about what it MEANS to be resilient and how much of a role mindset plays in our ability t...

What happens when the worst-case scenario becomes reality? Every business owner I know has that nightmare that runs through the back of their head... What if it all just stops? What if no one needs my services and suddenly no one needs what I'm selling? What do I do then? For a lot of business owners, this has been the year where they had to figure out what the answer to those questions was. How d...

What would happen if you had to step away from your business for a few weeks? A few months? Would everything come crashing to a halt? Or would there be a clear path forward for someone else to pick up the baton and keep your business going? Being resilient means being able to bounce back from adversity, to pivot and reset after a change. But you only become truly resilient if you examine where you...

As founders and business owners, we tend to build businesses that reflect us. Our strengths become the strengths of our business. And, yep, our weaknesses become the weaknesses of the business… because we’re the ones who are building it. That’s why investing in developing skills to strengthen how we personally deal with change creates a huge impact on how we approach leading our businesses through...

Change is hard. There's no real way around that. It's disruptive, it breaks your flow and it takes time and resources to react to and manage changes as they happen. And yet, you and your business won't flourish without some change. Being able to manage and adapt to change in a rapidly changing environment is one of the hallmarks of being resilient. But for most people, change means unknown and sca...