#267: Expert Tips to Boost Your Service Biz

If you’ve ever considered starting a service-based business but are unsure of how to start it or how to boost it, then you’ve come to the right place.

My guest today is Emylee Williams, the co-founder of Boss Project. Emylee is an expert in providing support and coaching to service-based businesses. She helps them grow and scale.

So, whether you’re a copywriter, marketer, photographer, or any other service provider, this podcast is a must-listen.

In this episode, we talk about:

• How to attract your first clients
• How to set up your offer
• How to manage your time
• How to find the shortcuts
• How to manage your business mindset

Even if you’re not in the service-based business, the skills and strategies that Emylee shares are transferable, especially when we talk about mindset. So, stay tuned as we delve deep into the world of service-based businesses and uncover some of the secrets to their success.

Show Notes:

• MiloTreeCart
• Catch My Party
• MiloTree Pop-Up App
• Get on a free call with me
• Emylee Williams
• Personality Quiz: What Digital Product Should I Create?
• Join My Blogger Genius Email List
• Become a Blogger Genius Facebook Group
• MiloTreeCart Affiliate Program
• All Blogger Genius Podcast Episodes

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Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie 0:11
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Blogger Genius Podcast. I’m your host, Jillian Leslie. I am a blogger and serial entrepreneur started with Catch My Party in 2009. If you need party ideas, head over there.

Jillian Leslie 0:27
And then my husband and I built our MiloTree pop-up app that so many of you in this audience use to grow your social media followers, and email subscribers. And remember, super optimized won’t slow down your site, plays well with Google and your ad network.

Jillian Leslie 0:43
And recently, we launched MiloTreeCart, which is a way to get paid for digital products like digital downloads, and workshops and memberships and coaching, anything that you can sell digitally.

Jillian Leslie 0:57
I wanted to share a conversation I had today with a food blogger who wants to create her first eBook with recipes. And she asked me whether she needed to go make new recipes for this eBook.

Jillian Leslie 1:08
And I said, “Absolutely not. Take your best recipes that are already published on your blog that you are offering for free and bundle them up because somebody will pay for the fact that you serve up a solution.” That’s easy.

Jillian Leslie 1:27
If you have questions about how to get started, please get on a fee call with me, we’ll talk about your idea. I’ll give you feedback. I’ll share how MiloTreeCart fits into this but no hard sell. If this is interesting to you. Go to milotree.com/meet.

Jillian Leslie 1:46
For today’s episode, I have Emylee Williams on the podcast. And she is the co-founder of Boss Project. What she and her partner do is offer support and coaching to service-based businesses.

Jillian Leslie 2:03
So, if you’ve ever thought about a service, you could provide like copywriting or marketing or photography, but you don’t know how to get started or how to grow your client base. This is the podcast for you.

Jillian Leslie 2:16
And again, all of the skills that we talked about are relevant for all kinds of businesses, including blogging. So, without further delay, here is my interview with Emylee Williams.

How to Explode Your Service Based Business

Jillian Leslie 2:30
Emylee, welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast.

Emylee Williams 2:34
Hi, thank you for having me.

Jillian Leslie 2:36
You and your partner, do something interesting, coaching service businesses. Could you explain what that is? What that looks like and what you guys offer?

Emylee Williams 2:50
I am the CEO, founder and CMO over at Boss Project. We are a digital agency for service-based business owners and we show up in a variety of ways for our clients. We have a plethora of free content for our DIY folks who are just getting started who are really scaling up to their first six figures in one-on-one services.

Jillian Leslie 3:15
Give me some examples of these service businesses just so people have a mental model.

Emylee Williams 3:23
We work with everyone from photographers to wedding planners to copywriters, and designers to bookkeepers, and accountants. We have a client who used to work at FEMA, and she does emergency preparedness plans for corporations.

Emylee Williams 3:38
We have another client who does cookie baking contests for team building activities for companies like Google and Amazon. It really runs the gamut of who we work with from mostly female and women lead entrepreneurs in the creative service-based business realm.

Emylee Williams 3:54
They either have some sort of creative eye and creative energy, where they care about how their things look and feel and come across, but they are an absolute expert in the way that they show up for their clients, and we help figure out what are the missing pieces in order for you to get to the next level.

Emylee Williams 3:54
We have our DIY resources, like our blog and our podcasts over at The Strategy Hour. We have, “Do it with us” resources, like our incubator program, our Mastermind program where it’s a little bit mix of curriculum, but also coaching and one-on-one critiques and feedbacks at various touch points in your business.

Emylee Williams 4:27
And we also have C-Suite on demand services where we come into your business and act as fractional CFOs, fractional CMOs, project managers and really help you organize the structure of your company your business in order to scale.

Emylee Williams 4:40
And we also have done for you services like website design and development with strategic layout specifically for service-based business owners who are wanting to increase the conversions of their prospect journey on their website.

Emylee Williams 4:52
So, the traffic of people who are landing there, getting more of them to convert to book a discovery call with you or fill out your lead capture form.

Jillian Leslie 4:59
Wow. It sounds like you are very busy doing what you’re doing.

Emylee Williams 5:05
We have an incredible team, lots of people who can support you on the backend. And we like to have various touch points in our clients lives and businesses, because it’s never just one thing that’s going to make a big difference. It’s a little bit of tiny levers that you can pull across the board.

How to Attract Your First Clients

Jillian Leslie 5:19
Let’s say I wanted to be a copywriter. And I decided I’m going to go off and I’m good. Let’s say I’m good, but I don’t have any clients. Walk me through. Because I have a feeling a lot of people in my audience are going, “I have this skill and this talent, but I wouldn’t know how to start it.” Walk me through that journey.

Emylee Williams 5:47
First and foremost, I highly recommend you go browse our blog archives, and our podcast archives, we have an incredible search tool, where you can just enter in any keyword.

Emylee Williams 5:55
gen, more clients, client experience, pricing, onboarding, whatever question that you have, and there’s going to be articles and episodes that populate for you to dive into. That’s the first place that I would check.

Emylee Williams 6:05
We have probably over 1,000 blog posts at this point over 700 podcast episodes up on our show that’s ranked consistently in the top 50 in business worldwide. So, we have a lot of incredible content for you to dive into.

Emylee Williams 6:18
Ultmately, if you have your skill, and you know you’re really good at it, you’ve got to start working with some clients. You can actually start to figure out what does your process look like? What are the tangible solutions that you solve? What are the problems that you solve for your clients?

Emylee Williams 6:30
Who do you want to work with what really makes sense for you to actually offer in your scope within your deliverables, and you won’t know that until you actually start doing it.

Emylee Williams 6:39
So, if you’re literally truly just getting started, there’s going to be a little bit of a messy middle, I think a lot of people will try to figure out that they can launch with the perfect website, the perfect offer, the perfect package that’s price perfectly, has amazing scope and deliverables.

Emylee Williams 6:52
It’s going to take the exact perfect amount of time; every time and it’s going to be a rinse and repeat formula. And that is just absolutely not possible within your first probably five to 10 clients.

Emylee Williams 7:03
If you’ve been repeatedly serving the exact same type of client in the exact same type of offer, you can then start to create processes and automations and SOPs behind the scenes that can help speed up that process. Help you get to your solution faster with your clients, but you actually have to start doing it messy first.

Emylee Williams 7:20
So, in order to actually get there, we’ve got to figure out where are the people that I can actually start serving. And before you even literally worry about a mailing list or a social media presence or content on your website, you’ve got to start having conversations with the people that you actually already know first.

Emylee Williams 7:36
We work our clients through a process in our one week to client’s program. So, if you are you looking to untap clients and really utilize your network of what we call connectors, and getting referrals from connectors of ideal clients, reach out to us on DMs and we can talk to you more about that program.

Emylee Williams 7:53
But ultimately what it is identifying within your inner circle. Who are the people that you know, that are like the “Chatty Cathy’s,” the outgoing, the extroverted, the talkative people, the people who are most involved in organizations in your community, in your industry, they don’t necessarily have to be local, but they’re well connected people.

Emylee Williams 7:53
What we like to do is try to get coffee dates with three to five well connected people when we’re introducing a new service. And we talked to that person, like we’re trying to build a relationship, a connection of friendship, just having an actual human to human conversation.

Emylee Williams 8:28
What are you up to? What have you got going on? How can I support you? I’m launching this new service. I know that I can do really well for these kinds of people. Do you know anyone who you can introduce me to? Refer me to? Get me their contact information so I can start the conversation with people who might want to work with me.

Emylee Williams 8:44
The people who know you who are close to you really want you to succeed, and they would love to be the reason why you succeed. So, they’re going to introduce you to the right people, they’re going to open some doors for you, quite literally.

Emylee Williams 8:59
Abigail’s business, my business before we even knew each other, got off the ground from one referral, it was my best friend’s mom, and it was her mother-in-law, who were our connectors for us.

Emylee Williams 9:10
They introduced us to our very next ideal dreamy client, who paid the price point we were after, who were thrilled beyond belief about the service that we delivered and who recommended us to all of their friends, families and their connections.

Emylee Williams 9:22
And that snowballed into a booked out roster that enabled us to really perfect our process and take away what we didn’t want to deliver with clients and really hone in on what we could really see that was making a difference.

Emylee Williams 9:34
And within our first, I would say probably six to eight months of doing that individually, we were able to really say this is what I offer for this type of person. And this is what it needs to charge in order for me to deliver my result.

Emylee Williams 9:47
And if you can just get there that’s like your first phase of, we’re in business and now we have something that we can grow off of.

How to Set Up Your Offer

Jillian Leslie 9:54
How do I think about my offer? My audience is predominantly women like you are serving female entrepreneurs and business owners. And the struggle that I see over and over again is, how do I know my value? And how do I put it out there and not undercharge? And not be so pleasing that I now am a slave to my clients?

Emylee Williams 10:25
Absolutely. A lot of this has to do with self-reflection, confidence, whether it’s real or not. An understanding of your capacity and your utilization. I like to look at this from two lenses, the facts and the feeling side.

Emylee Williams 10:40
The facts are non-negotiable, absolute black and white facts. How much time do you have in your week? Literally, how much time do you have in your week? Do you still have a full-time job and you’re trying to get this off the ground? Do you have a part-time job?

Emylee Williams 10:52
Do you have kids or some caretaker that you need to be mindful of within your life so you don’t have a whole 40 hours? Do you have some sort of health issue that enables you to sometimes be in bed all day, because you’ve got stuff to deal with on your own personal level?

Emylee Williams 11:07
How much time are we working with in the service that we’re going to offer? How much time is required in order to fully deliver that thing?

Emylee Williams 11:07
Full top to bottom ecommerce website with someone who has a thousand products is going to take a lot different time scope, then copywriting for blog post, for an industry that you know really well, that doesn’t require a lot of research.

Emylee Williams 11:31
So, you got to understand truly how much time that you are working with, and then marry that with how much time is actually required for you to deliver the result that you want to deliver. Once you connect those facts, then you can just play the puzzle of what does my offer actually look like.

Emylee Williams 11:47
What does the scope and deliverables need to be in order to solve this solution? Say you’re a copywriter, and you want to focus on copywriting for sales pages that help your clients convert more of their offer to their ideal client, they’re selling more of the thing that they’re selling on that sales page.

Emylee Williams 12:06
So, you might be looking at, I have 20 hours a week, within that 20 hours a week to work on your business, you don’t have all 20 hours to work on client work.

Emylee Williams 12:18
That is literally impossible, because you have an actual business to run. As the founder you have emails to send, you have your own bookkeeping to keep up with. You have maybe content and to write, you have client work to actually do maybe have some networking meetings to go to there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on within the container of those 20 hours.

Emylee Williams 12:35
We like to tell our founders that they have honestly about 25% ish of their week available to actually do client deliverables. Once you figure out based on how much time you have in the week, 20% to 25% of that time you can be spending doing the actual client work.

Emylee Williams 12:52
This isn’t emailing, this isn’t bookkeeping, this isn’t follow-up, this isn’t onboarding calls, this is doing the work to get that project done. So, once you do that math, you’ll be able to understand, well in a week, I can dedicate this much time to a client project.

Emylee Williams 13:06
If I’m working on copy for a sales page, how many of those realistically do I think I could do in a week in a month? Well, then now backtracking that’s going to tell me how many clients I need to work with, or what price point I need to charge versus how many clients I need to work with in order to reach my monthly goal.

Emylee Williams 13:24
And then outside backtracking out of that, if I need to work with this many clients per month in order to reach my goal, how many conversations do I need to be having? How many discovery calls do I need to have?

Emylee Williams 13:34
I know not 100% of those are going to land. But if I’m really good at that part of the job I could be lending 75% or 80% of those discovery calls into closed client deals.

Emylee Williams 13:44
If that’s my rate, how many conversations do I need to be having? How many events do I need to be getting myself involved in or emails that I need to be sending out in order to get people interested in having a conversation with me?

Emylee Williams 13:55
Everything comes from facts that then marries with how do I actually want to run my business? And at what capacity do I want to be giving? Because could we all ultimately work towards running a million or multimillion dollar business on our own or with a lean team? Absolutely.

Emylee Williams 14:14
But if that’s not in alignment with the time that you actually have or the type of work that you want to be doing day in and day out, those goals are going to be out of alignment with how you can actually show up to achieve them.

Join The Blogger Genius Podcast Newsletter to Get the Biggest Takeaways Every Week

Jillian Leslie 14:30
I wanted to take a short break to say if you are enjoying the show, please join my newsletter because every Sunday, I send you my four biggest takeaways from my most recent episode, they’re like Cliff Notes, so please head to bloggergenius.com and sign up and you will hear from me with the most cutting-edge online business tips every week.

Jillian Leslie 14:57
Again, it’s bloggergenius.com. And now back to the show.

How to Find the Shortcuts to Scale Your Service Based Business

Jillian Leslie 15:05
Where are the shortcuts? Where do you see people find success. One thing that you talked about is looking for the connectors. And if you can get a good connector versus the introverts, you could talk to 10 introverts who don’t know anybody and don’t feel comfortable.

Jillian Leslie 15:25
Or you could talk to that one connector who has this unbelievable email list, or they can DM anybody and that is like gold. Again, this idea, as you’re going through this process, I’m like, wow, this is also very exhausting that I need to be there all the time. So, where do you see people find a lot of traction?

Emylee Williams 15:53
Honestly, the shortcut, so to speak, I know, you guys are going to roll your eyes at me because it’s just the fact of doing business, but then it’s just repeating it and doing it over and over again.

Emylee Williams 16:07
The shortcut is once you identify how much time you have to give, then that can help inform the price of the offer that you need to charge at, based on your financial goals, married with your capacity.

Emylee Williams 16:20
Once you find the answers to those equations, which only you can bring to the table only, you know how much time you have to give, only you know your financial goals, only you know what’s the price range, you want to charge. There’s absolutely people who are like, “Oh, I can absolutely not charge $10,000 for this service.”

Emylee Williams 16:20
We’re going to have to work with more people. Do you have the capacity to work with more people? Yes or No. Some people would rather work with hundreds of clients throughout the year, because they want to have a lower price point, they don’t want to go into that premium landscape.

Emylee Williams 16:48
Some of us only want to work with five clients a year. Well, if that’s the case, then we need to be having a premium package. So, you’ve got to do some self-reflection on where are you comfortable, where can you push yourself a little bit, once you have that information, the shortcut is to keep doing that over and over and over again.

Why You Need to Be Laser Focused

Emylee Williams 17:07
And truly, it’s harder than it sounds. Do not let yourself get distracted by virility, by trendy marketing tactics, by things that you think are going to beef up your expertise, or your appearance online.

Emylee Williams 17:23
And laser focus on the things that are actually going to fill your pipeline with leads that are going to convert that are going to help you reach your financial goals. And once you can do that consistently for a year, a year and a half, two years, then we can start asking ourselves, here’s where I bought my business by myself.

Emylee Williams 17:41
Maybe it’s you and one VA at the end of the day. But I know someone right now a client of ours, who it’s literally her, and she is a website designer and copywriter, she brought her business by herself to over $500,000. That’s the biggest I’ve seen someone bring their service-based business by themselves.

Emylee Williams 18:02
She’s at capacity, though she’s over capacity, and the only thing that’s going to help her scale past that. And I mean scale past that in the sense of, she would be fine if she made $500,000 every year for the rest of her business life, that’s a great amount of money, she’s making a very healthy salary off of that, it feels good. It’s a manageable size.

Emylee Williams 18:22
The only way for her to continue to replicate those results is for her to have support. Because she’s over capacity, she can’t serve any more clients, she is out of time, like herself is out of time. So, she’s going to need to be training people within her organization to take some of that client delivery off of her plate.

Emylee Williams 18:41
We can’t even get there and worry about that until we’re at that point.

When You Might Want to Pivot to Teaching Others

Jillian Leslie 18:45
But then there’s like a fork in the road, which is you’ve reached your limit. Either you are going to be hiring more people and doing this bespoke white glove service type business, or is there a way to pivot to something where you can teach people how to do this or scale your business in that way?

Jillian Leslie 19:17
Especially as somebody who wants to help people sell digital products and do things like having an expensive mastermind or do you help clients? How do you help clients decide which way to go?

Emylee Williams 19:33
So, our specialty is helping service-based business owners scale an agency. It’s doing more of the service for more people. It’s not necessarily the teaching and opening up one-to many models, although we have a hybrid business model. It’s hybrid one-to-many hybrid one-on-one.

Emylee Williams 19:50
I love me a one-to-many business model. There’s no shame in that game, if that’s the way that you want to show up in the world. I love that for you.

Emylee Williams 19:57
The only caveat and with a conversation I honestly wish more service-based business owners were having with themselves before they went down that route is truly understanding how different of a business model it is to their current business model.

Emylee Williams 20:12
This is something I did not realize when we shifted to one-to-many, we were serving one-on-one five days a week. We were meeting clients for coffee, we were having incredible relationships, we were getting contracts and checks written out to us within the same pitch meeting, because our clients were so excited to work with us and see the results.

Emylee Williams 20:28
There was a lot of physical labor, we were styling and setting up shoots for businesses and brands. So, it definitely demanded a different part of our brain and our body in order to deliver the things, which is a big part of the reason why we wanted to scale to one to many.

Emylee Williams 20:39
We had a very, very strong desire to educate and to help other business owners achieve more ease in their service- based business. What we didn’t realize, though, is that we were speaking to an entirely different audience.

Emylee Williams 20:52
And we were building two different businesses at the same time. Our agency was serving our one-on-one clients who only ever needed one-on-one work. And we were growing other business owners who were excited to learn the things from us so that they could do those things for our clients.

Emylee Williams 21:08
So ultimately, we had to shift the amount of attention, one business got over the other dependent on which one we want it to grow. And in that shift, we had to be okay with a little bit loss of income on the agency side in order to beef up the income from the one-to-many side.

Emylee Williams 21:24
And I don’t think enough people realize that they either need to better prepare for that shift as in, you need to have more savings, or just mentally, you need to better prepare for that shift.

Emylee Williams 21:34
We were so used to closing $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 client deals, to now needing thousands of people to be aware of what we were selling so that we can make that same amount of money on a $1,000 course, or a $5,000 course or a $27 course.

Emylee Williams 21:55
And I don’t think our brains fully wrap around. I say this as an hour, me and Abigail’s brains, but we’ve helped so many clients do this math, where they’re not ready to sign up for the type of marketing that’s required for one-to-many, and the type of showing up as a thought leader that’s required for one-to-many.

Emylee Williams 22:12
And ultimately, a lot of our clients realize, oh, that’s actually not the kind of business I want to run. I thought I could just do more like behind the scenes stuff and have passive income, everyone talks about passive income, but they don’t realize how much work is setting up in maintaining that passive income.

Emylee Williams 22:29
And so, we have a little bit of like, if we pull these levers in your service-based business a little bit differently, you can still reach the income goals that you’re after without starting a different business or different revenue stream.

Jillian Leslie 22:41
Which way are you guys leaning now that you have both? Because as somebody who has multiple businesses, I know how difficult it is to be going, “Right now I’m doing this.” And they’re very different. So which way are you guys leaning?

Emylee Williams 22:58
Kind of interesting. So, 2020 was a weird year for a lot of us. It definitely was a good year for us, business wise. A lot of people were getting laid off, or they were leaving their careers because of the pandemic. And they wanted to start a business or they wanted to take their business seriously.

Why 2022 Was a Hard Financial Year for Service Based Businesses

Emylee Williams 23:17
And we saw a lot of growth in 2020, we saw a lot of growth in 2021. Because of that same kind of trickle-down effect. 2022 was a really hard year for us and for a lot of people. Sales were harder to come by people were a lot more skeptical than they’ve ever been before.

Emylee Williams 23:35
People were budgeting a lot tighter and expenses were tightening up in businesses and individuals. So, we had to shift our attention and our focus, there were less leads. So, we had to make sure we were having the right conversations, putting the right offer in front of people depending on where they were at.

Emylee Williams 23:52
So, I would say in years prior to the one that we’re heading into right now, 2023 easily our one-to-many model was making up 70% of our income and everything else was affiliates or advertisers for our podcast, or just random income, a little bit of services here and there.

Emylee Williams 24:11
And that has absolutely flipped the complete opposite way, where our one-on-one services are now about 60% to 70% of our business and the rest is one-to-many, but that flows depending on how the market is behaving.

Jillian Leslie 24:25
Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. And where the zeitgeist is, I do think like everybody in 2020 into 2021, for example, that I saw was starting a food blog, and baking bread and going I could just take photos of this and make a million dollars. Then all of a sudden, the reality it’s like you’re seeing it now with streaming services. All we did was stay home and watch shows.

Jillian Leslie 24:56
And as soon as we’ve gone out into the world, we’re not watching it as many shows and Netflix is struggling. So, I completely understand that.

Strategies for Cultivating the Right Business Mindset

Jillian Leslie 25:05
The one thing that I just want to touch on is the mindset piece. I deal with online entrepreneurs every day. And the place where I feel like we, as women business owners get stuck is the belief in ourselves, especially for a one-person operation.

Jillian Leslie 25:29
Getting up every morning and doing what it takes to make this happen. Let’s say the money is not coming in yet, or in dribs and drabs, or we’re so grateful when we make $500. How do you speak to the people you are coaching? Because you’re just going to meet with clients and have coffee, and they’re going to sign these big checks.

Jillian Leslie 25:54
And you’re going to just put yourself in front of people and share what you do, and they’re going to be so excited. I wish that for everybody.

Emylee Williams 26:05
In an ideal world.

Jillian Leslie 26:00
Exactly. But in reality, we all face self-doubt. We all question our skills, even though I’m pitching myself in the example, as a copywriter who’s really good at copywriting, I think we all feel impostor syndrome. And it feels like this is like 9/10th of it.

Jillian Leslie 26:23
Because if you can master the mindset piece, then the world is like your oyster. But that piece can be very difficult. How do you speak to that?

Mindset Do-ers vs. Be-ers

Emylee Williams 26:37
So, there are two angles that we like to look at it. And we had actually a good friend of mine on our show a couple of years ago at this point, and we had a whole episode where we broke this down. And ultimately, it branched out into this conversation of do-ers versus be-ers. And you’ll identify yourself as one of these.

Emylee Williams 26:56
What’s funny is that you can be both you can be one in one season of your life, and you can transition into another, you can be one in an unhealthy version of your life and strive to be the other when you’re fully confident and capable and in a healthier version of your life.

Emylee Williams 27:10
So, the overall breakdown is do-ers are the people who start to believe that they can, after they do the work, you serve the client. You have a receipt, you have proof, you have a case study that you did the thing. And now you can be like, great, I can keep doing that thing.

Emylee Williams 27:28
And as long as you do the thing, then you’re going to believe that you can keep doing the thing. That’s what I would love every person to have that skill and that headspace because that’s the thing that’s going to like, if you just got receipts, and the proof that you could do the thing, then you’re good, and you can keep doing the thing. That’s not always the case.

Emylee Williams 27:47
And a lot of us are be-ers more so than we maybe would like to be and so be-ers are the people who have to believe that they can do the thing before they actually do the thing. And these are where a lot of business perfectionist come in.

Emylee Williams 28:02
So, if you find yourself redoing your website over and over again, because it’s not perfect, the brand colors aren’t right, the photos aren’t right. If you find yourself scrapping your social media strategy and trying TikTok or Instagram or a YouTube channel or a podcast because you just want to build up an audience before you actually start to sell.

Emylee Williams 28:20
Or you’re redoing your opt-in or your freebie or your content or whatever it might be. You’re getting hung up on this thing of like, when this thing is perfect, then I will feel confident and we’re going do the thing. That is the hardest space to be in. And I hate it for all of us. Because we’ve all been there.

Jillian Leslie 28:39
Exactly. We’ve all been there as a recovering perfectionist.

Emylee Williams 28:45
Yes.

Jillian Leslie 28:45
Absolutely.

Emylee Williams 28:46
Yes, yes. And so, while I haven’t entirely figured it out, for myself, at least just in my own personal experience, I have to begin to identify what are the checkpoints, support, resources, reminders that I need in my life in order to keep me in do-er mode.

Emylee Williams 29:08
Because if I’m in a healthy do-er mode, I’m going to get enough proof that I can do the thing that will help me keep doing the thing. What’s really interesting is that I’m in a business partnership, Abigail and myself are 50/50 business partners, co-founders of this company that we have.

Emylee Williams 29:24
And when we started out as partners, I knew that I would get an immense value from having someone else within my business with me, because I thrive off of external deadlines external pressure, I don’t want to let her down. So, I will do what I know I need to do in order to move the business forward.

Emylee Williams 29:46
So literally, just by having a different cook in the kitchen, I’m able to stay on top of my task to check in not every day because sometimes I don’t feel great and I message her and I’m not into working or I’m late on that deadline because something came up. And we’re definitely flexible and we communicate with each other.

Emylee Williams 30:06
But literally just having another presence, especially now that we’re a team of seven, I have a team that I can’t let down, I have a team that’s looking to me. So, I know that if I thrive off it not just validation, but external awareness, then I’m going to put those measures in place.

Emylee Williams 30:22
So for you, it might not look like getting a business partner, actually I highly recommend you not do that, talk to me first. But it might look like sharing your next 30-day goal on Instagram, or with your family and your friends, or posting it up where other people can see it and check in on your accountability on your progress on what you’re doing.

Emylee Williams 30:43
If external validation or support isn’t going to work for you, you’re going to have to do some soul searching on what is the thing that’s going to actually help you move the needle.

Emylee Williams 30:52
Is it some sort of habit tracker that you want to start building and literally start to color in a little circle as you keep doing the actions and once you are the person who then follows through on the actions, you can continue doing them.

Emylee Williams 31:06
An example that a friend of mine gave in that podcast episode because she was a be-er, she was a small business owner who is starting as a be-er and I think a lot of us do. And it’s hard to get out of that perfectionist realm.

Emylee Williams 31:18
The root underneath perfectionism is you may not trust yourself to be the person who does what you say you are going to do, or what you want to do. Ultimately, that’s what a lot of perfectionist lies in, it might not be good enough, so therefore you’re not going to do it.

Emylee Williams 31:36
So, in order to flex that muscle, retrain that muscle, you simply simply need to become someone who says they do what they’re going to do, they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do.

Emylee Williams 31:47
So, what my friend did was, she wanted to be someone who floss every day had nothing to do with business had nothing to do with clients, it didn’t matter. It was a low hanging fruit task. So she said, I’m going to prove myself that I am someone who does what she says she’s going to do, and I’m going to floss every day.

Emylee Williams 32:05
And so every single day, she flosses and maybe she filled in a habit tracker, or maybe it was just enough to just do the action every day. But after a certain while her brain started to realize you are someone who follows through on what you say you’re going to do. So now let’s add something else to that kind of task.

Emylee Williams 32:21
What else do you want to do that you want to consistently do? Prove to yourself that you’re someone who will follow through, even if it’s making the bed, flossing your teeth, literally whatever it might be, we just have to retrick our brain or retrain our brain to be like, you say, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it.

Why You Want to Get on Your Own Side and Lower the Bar

Jillian Leslie 32:39
I come at it a little bit differently, which is, I try to get on my own side. So, that almost as if I’m like my best friend. When I achieve something, even if it’s small, I tried to stop and celebrate that because it’s so easy to lose sight of how far you’ve come. Because the road ahead always looks so long. It’s just those moments where I try really hard to say, good job, Jill.

Jillian Leslie 33:15
Second thing I do is I lower the bar, so that I can achieve that goal. I will say, alright, today, I am going to write this blog post, and I’m going to do a really crappy job. I tell this to my daughter who is 15 all the time, she has to do a rough draft and I go, if it’s good, I need to be disappointed. So, please make it bad.

Jillian Leslie 33:40
And by giving her that freedom, giving myself that freedom, I’m able to achieve my goal because the truth is, it’ll be bad. I’ll write that blog post. And it’ll be bad, maybe it’s not horrible. But I will achieve it. And then the next goal will be make it just a little bit better.

Emylee Williams 34:01
We have what we call an experimental mindset and a culture of curiosity, a built-in art to our team culture. And it’s a lot like that where we are such a collaborative environment within our team that I don’t expect anything, not a single thing that my team submits as done, or presents as an idea or when they do their part of this project for it to be perfect.

Emylee Williams 34:25
Because all of us have unique skills that we’re bringing to the table in order to carry that project forward or to the end to the finish line. And so, what we call it especially as we’re training new employees, we say just submit your MVP. So, like what’s your MVP, your most viable product, your version of what you can put out right now.

Emylee Williams 34:44
Maybe your version today it’s at 50%. But ultimately through training and through exercise and through doing it again, your version eventually is going to be at like 80% or 90%. And our team is going to be able to put the finishing details on that thing and it’s going to be good to go.

Emylee Williams 34:59
Every single one of our team members is released of the expectation of bringing anything to our table that’s at 100%. Because I don’t want them to. So, it’s the same kind of concept. Give yourself that same permission.

Jillian Leslie 35:10
I had a friend once. And she said, I can’t hand out a blank piece of paper, because it’s so filled with possibility. And as soon as I draw one line on it somehow, I’ve messed it up. No, I think she’s got bigger problems.

Jillian Leslie 35:28
I remember thinking that and going, that is so sad. What a sad way to see the world rather than I’ll write a line and I could cross it out, write a different one. So, I think that we don’t we don’t give ourselves enough grace.

Jillian Leslie 35:47
Emylee, if there’s somebody listening who’s like, “Hey, I’m ready to start that thing on my own, but need some help?” How can people reach out to you and learn what you guys do?

Emylee Williams 36:00
The best place for you all to go is bossproject.com, that’s going to be able to send you off into all the directions, you can browse the blog, you can see the latest episodes on the podcast, you can reach out to us on our waitlist for services, you can browse what it’s like to work with us.

Emylee Williams 36:12
When you do reach out for services. It literally books a time with Abigail, so she’ll just find out where you are right now in your business. What are some of your hesitations? Where are you wanting to be and if there’s something that we have that makes sense for you, whether it’s a free or paid product or service, we’re going to point you in the right direction.

Emylee Williams 36:33
You can also definitely slide into our DMS over on Instagram @bossproject, I would love for you to come introduce yourself. Let me know that you came from this show so I know where you’re coming from. And we can have a conversation.

Emylee Williams 36:45
If you have a question about a specific topic or episode that we’ve covered. Our team is really great at hunting down our own content and sending it over to you. So, if you just let me know a topic that you want to dive into, I’m happy to pull those resources for you.

Emylee Williams 36:59
We have a plethora of ways that you could work with us. We host free workshops throughout the year. So, definitely be mindful of checking our Instagram to see if there’s any free thing that’s happening coming up soon. We would love to have you join one of those.

Emylee Williams 37:12
And our podcasts again, is The Strategy, you can listen to it wherever you listen to shows, start at their most recent episodes and work your way back. Because we’ve been doing the show for seven years. So, we’re obviously better at it now than we were seven years ago. So, listen now.

Jillian Leslie 37:28
Got it. I just have to say, I feel like you’ve given really good tactical things, and also emotional things. I feel like there are these two sides to your business you can have both.

Emylee Williams 37:45
Yes.

Jillian Leslie 37:45
Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Emylee Williams 37:48
Thanks for having me.

Jillian Leslie 37:49
I hope you guys like this episode. My biggest takeaway from Emylee is that it is hard to put yourself out there and ask for the sale no matter what kind of sale it is. And I think that’s why we shy away from doing it. But I loved Emylee’s strategies.

Jillian Leslie 38:06
And I love this idea that you want to find the people who are the connectors, and grow your business organically one by one beginning until you figured out your processes and hopefully by then you realize you’re not an impostor.

Jillian Leslie 38:21
Before I go, I want to say if you’re ready to start selling eBooks and guides and workshops, and coaching and memberships and all that good stuff and you want a friend in your corner, get on a call with me just go to milotree.com/meet. It’s free, no hard selling. It’s really just to help you come up with a strategy to take action.

Jillian Leslie 38:45
So again, go to milotreecart.com/meet because I would love to meet you and I will see you here again next week.

Other related Blogger Genius Podcast episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How to Nail Your Sales Message with Melissa Harstine
• Proven Strategies for Making Money Online with Casey Botticello
• Create an Easy Passive Income Stream With These 10 Tips with Morgan Nield

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