#226 - Q+A Part 1: Contractors, Company Culture, and Cold Calls

Emily recently hosted a Q&A session in the Being Boss Community, and now we're publishing her answers in a two-part series. In this first episode, Emily tackles navigating uneasy feelings around onboarding a contractor into your top-secret processes, how to overcome overwhelm as a multi-passionate and totally prolific creative, how to maintain company culture as a remote team, how to determine the most important metrics to track in your business, and how to cold call like a boss.

This episode is sponsored by Freshbooks Cloud Accounting and Acuity Scheduling.

Get full show notes for this episode here

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Transcript

Emily Thompson: 0:45

How are you doing Boss, I know that many of you are feeling an edge, an edge to make the very most of this downtime and to move your business along even if things are feeling slow, to prepare for what I truly believe is going to be a new economy, and to connect with a community of business owners who are figuring this out as we go. Well, the being boss conference is now online, making it accessible to every one of you, no matter where you are. And in light of world events, we're shifting our content in ways that will make it most helpful to you now, focusing on time management and marketing in this new world of doing business, keynotes, panels, breakout sessions, Live podcast recordings, and more. Making up three days of a virtual conference for creative business owners that is unlike anything that's been done before. Sure, we won't be sipping Zaza Rex in the French Quarter, not this time, but you can wear your yoga pants and still get insights and tactics from top creative business owners, who are also navigating this disruptive moment in history and connect with creative business owners from all over the world. Get your virtual ticket and join in, make the most of this time and figure out how you and your business are going to make it through to the other side at better than before. Learn more and join us at being boss club slash conference. I'm Emily Thompson. And I'm Kathleen Shannon. And this is being boss. In this episode of being boss, join me as I do something totally new here on this show. Because if there's ever a time to do something new, it's now am I right? A few weeks ago, I hopped on a call with the bosses and the being boss community to answer their questions in a q&a session of epic proportions. I spent an hour and a half answering over a dozen questions from a wide variety of creative business owners, including agency owners and designers and illustrators and even an astrologer. We've taken these questions and my life coaching answers and created not one but two episodes that we'll be sharing here on being boss. This is episode number one of this little series and today I'll be sharing five questions that I dug in on with our community bosses along with my answers. Here's what we're diving into today. Navigating uneasy feelings around onboarding a contractor into your top secret processes, how to overcome overwhelm as a multi passionate and totally prolific creative how to maintain company culture as a remote team how to determine the most important metrics to track in your business and how to cold call like a boss. As always, you can find all the tools books and links we referenced on the show notes at WWW dot being boss dot club.

Freshbooks: 3:38

being your own boss means finding ways to optimize and better manage your time. Have you heard of freshbooks It's a suite of business tools that include things like easy to use automations to help you spend less time invoicing, expensing and tracking projects, and more time becoming the CEO you always wanted to be freshbooks is packed with features to help you manage your always valuable time. Send automatically payment reminders on invoices, create recurring invoices. And if you want to get fancy use subscriptions for hands off billing. It's all ridiculously easy to set up and use and it leaves you more time to focus on being a boss. For a limited time freshbooks is offering our listeners 50% off your first three months when you upgrade to a paid plan go to freshbooks comm slash being boss and enter being boss in the How did you hear about us section that's fresh books calm slash being boss for 50% off your first three months.

Emily Thompson: 4:43

Okay to get this started, you should know that I love some live q&a. I seriously feel as if this is where I'm most shine as a creative business expert. So when it came to brainstorming how it is that I really wanted to put my fingerprint on the being boss podcast. This is what feels really right to me. So figured I'd give it a go. I'm super excited to be chatting about business and not only with any old boss but the bosses and the being boss community. The group that I talked to for this q&a call was filled with familiar faces from folks that I've hung out with at vacations or spent a lot of time with and my masterminds and plenty of business owners that I've gotten to know in the community over the last few months and totally hope to meet in real life one day. So let's get this party started. First up, we have a question from Cali, a web designer and founder of June mango design. Kelly asks, I'm beginning to scale my web design business by hiring some awesome design contractors. For upcoming web projects, but I'm wondering how I protect my own web design process which proprietary, of course, an NDA, which is a non disclosure agreement that will be signed. But other than that to how do I fully immerse a contractor and what's needed to build a website in five days, without giving away the farm, perhaps this is just the cost of doing business and scaling things. Galli you're right cost of doing business, you'd have to trust other people to help you run your business. So NDA is one such tool that you can do to help mitigate some of the thievery I suppose that could happen to you can also make them sign a non compete and a lawyer can help you figure out exactly what that needs to be, so that they're not going and doing the same service for some period of time while they're working with you and post. But for the most part, you just need to let that go and trust the process. And also trust that no one can do what you do, and the way that you do it. Because we are all unique snowflakes. And they have not built the business that you have built. Even if someone steals it and tries to run away and do it, they're not going to get the same results that you do. They do not have the same client base that you have, you are years and years ahead of them. But also, your web design process isn't actually proprietary, not completely, you're not creating a unique product. With a unique process, you're building a website, which anyone can do. And sure you do it in a way that's very special to how it is that you do it. But I hear this often with people who think we're the people who think that they they have proprietary things that are really just things that anyone can do, you're just the only one currently doing them in that way. And there is no real rate, any real way to protect things like this, there are proprietary, that words gonna kill me today, there are proprietary processes, and there are ways that you can protect those things. But this is not really one of those cases. This is the case of you doing things in a special way and wanting to protect them, were you wanting to protect it, but and you can, but you also can't. And that can't part is doing business. So I hope that helps, mostly continued on the path let it go. Because every employee of every business who's shown systems has been shown quote unquote, proprietary or, oh my goodness, that word is gonna kill me proprietary processes that they can certainly take to another similar business or to their own business, and the world still has tons of businesses doing cool things. So don't let that stop you from growing your business. Next up, we have a question from Kelly Manzano, a mental health therapist and owner of summit health works. Kelly asks, How do you maintain multiple projects slash businesses in a way that makes progress towards goals and doesn't feel scattered or overwhelmed, I love the variety of projects I have. But I feel this organized and constantly juggling help. That is fact and in my years of doing more than one thing, I always feel overwhelmed, or usually feel overwhelmed, usually pretty scattered. But there are some ways to help you out. One thing that I do is I time block, which is something we talk a lot about here and if you have not watched it yet I have training on time blocking that you can find at being boss club slash time. And that is my favorite way for creating some structure around what I'm working on when because being proactive about your time is the best way for you to be ahead of the overwhelm. I like to think of blocking off entire days or occasionally half days for specific projects. So for me, I juggle my time between being boss and Almanac supply co Those are my two businesses slash projects that definitely can feel a little overwhelming when I'm thinking about all the things that have to be happening in each of them. But I find great success and creating blocks of time where I'm working on one or the other. And that structure those boundaries helped me stay focused on the thing when I'm doing it and not feeling overwhelmed by the other one because it has its time that will come. So I for being Boston Almanac This is for the most part half day block. So I will do mornings for all my back. And that's because I'm at the office, we have team meetings every morning. And so that's dedicated time for Almanac. So usually between 9am and 11 1130 12am, working on Almanac. After that time, I'm doing being boss. And that's pretty much almost every day, occasionally I'll have a whole day that's almanaque or a whole day that's being boss. But that ongoing structure helps me identify or helps me keep identified what my priorities are, and when so that's time number one, too, is things like separate email accounts, and separate Asana accounts. So Asana is the project management software that we use, I have two completely separate, I think they're called workspaces and Asana for each business, or even project sometimes a project will fall within one of those businesses. So I actually have an upcoming project that I'm not ready to talk about yet. Always have something up my sleeve, I have an upcoming project that has its own project in the being boss, there's little key there, Asana project, or workspace. And so I use my project management software to divide or categorize the things that I need to do so that I can keep really focused on one while I'm doing it or the other while I'm doing that one. And I find that really helps a lot. I will say one of the things they do keep combined. And this could cause some overwhelm. But I don't find it overwhelming personally, is it keeping everything on a single calendar. So instead of having separate calendars for everything, I make everything, go to my being boss calendar, whether it's Almanac or otherwise, that way, there's less of a likelihood for me to double booked myself. And I can look at my time management in terms of events, or travel that I'm doing or markets that we're doing for Almanac or whatever it's all in the context of a single calendar, because I'm only one human, and I can only process off of one calendar. So there's a couple of ways for you to divide and conquer, I think is really the idea. Be really proactive about time management, about time blocking, seeing when and where you're going to be focusing on which of those projects, show up, do the work as you're promising yourself, you're going to do it. And then use your project management software to treat whatever it is if it's a side hustle, if it's like some other little project that you're doing, treat it with as much importance as you would everything else. If it's that important to you. Oftentimes, the overwhelm will keep you from attacking the funding that you want to do, or the side project that you're trying to launch or that extra thing that you're trying to get off the ground or whatever it may be. Don't let it overwhelm keep you from doing it. Be proactive. Do the work. Yes, Kelly says okay, time blocking boundaries, project management space, a calendar and time management. Yep, all the tools that you use to be boss. And the one way use those tools to be boss. And the second thing that you're doing too, it can be very overwhelming to split your brain between two things, I often find that it can take me up to up to half an hour sometimes to stop one project and move to the next project. I think giving yourself buffer space is really important too. And really not bouncing back and forth. If I'm ever having a day where I am bouncing back and forth from let's just say writing social media posts for both businesses, it is not going to be a very productive day. And I usually very quickly find myself needing to stop, choose one, do the thing, finish it then move off, move to the next one and giving myself that buffer space in between. Which is why I like those half days because lunch is usually that buffer place like I can go have lunch, go for a walk, do whatever, come back, and my brain is rage just jump into the next thing. All right, Kelly says Of course love. I noticed when I don't regroup using priorities, then I'm busy but not priority. not productive. Agreed. You have to you have to lay out what's most important. All right, and Caroline says yes to half days. I have so much client days. At the moment, I'm working full days when I have the opportunity for half day I tend to be super productive. Yes. And this tool can be very true for going from let's say you're working in your business to on your business. It doesn't have to be two totally separate projects or one client to the next client, whenever your brain has to shift gears from one big task to the other, giving yourself one a good chunk of time to really like dive in and dedicate yourself to the first one, giving yourself buffer time to like finish sort of processing what you're working on in your head. Starting over with the next one is really important. But then also, yes, just generally working half days, I often find that whenever I'm doing very hardcore, especially creative work, or just really deep work, I also think, think very hard about spreadsheets in this place where I'm creating a monster spreadsheet for something I can I'm only productive for about half a day after those first four hours or so are over and nothing I do for the rest of day is going to be any good. And the being boss community, we often discuss our favorite tools from email marketing, doing surveys, scheduling software. If you've been a podcast listener for really any time at all, you know that when it comes to scheduling up clients, business besties or collaborators for meetings, check ins and even podcast recordings. We rely on acuity scheduling, and a reason being boss community thread one that I stayed out of for a while just to see where the chips fell. One boss asked for a recommendation between acuity scheduling and a competitor. And of course, our members started chiming and sharing their experience and unsurprising to me acuity scheduling one out as the boss preferred tool for automated scheduling, acuity scheduling, the scheduling assistant that works 24 seven behind the scenes to fill your calendars, but you don't have to, for a limited time only you can get 45 days of acuity scheduling absolutely free. no credit card required by going to acuity scheduling.com slash being boss. Okay, so next question comes from Kim Tao. She is the owner of SAS magazine, a women's lifestyle magazine and brand she asks, How do you maintain your company culture when having a remote slash virtual office with employees in different locations? This is such a good question and super relevant for so many situations. Especially Kim, I know you are thinking about going from having a physical office with your employees and going remote, just to see just to change things up. And I'll show you even my experience where I've done this as well. I started actually Cory here who's around, always lurking Corey here. I hired him whenever we had a physical office space. And we work together in that physical office space for maybe three years Are we together around three years. And that space and the team grew into I think five people at one point. At one point, whenever we were doing websites, and that was in the space, too, we actually had about 15 people between physical employees, some local contractors, and then remote contractors, as well. So very familiar with growing small culture, or small local culture. And that culture even grew beyond our team. So some of those local contractors would come in and be hanging out with us pretty constantly. And then people who were not our vendors, so not contractors, but we're friends like business friends, what can be a part of that company culture is what was very like, social community based culture. If that doesn't sound familiar eyes. I'm gonna tell you right now, it's very much being boss feely. So we had a very strong company culture, we loved it, we had like things that we would do. We have this thing where every time we would close a client, we'd all take a shot. That was a lot of fun. And sometimes we would get them early. We have to wait to like after lunch to do that. Oh, you're right, Cory. We used to play darts. All the time. I do miss playing darts a ton. We used to go out for lunch every Friday the entire team. So there are things that you can do when you were in physical space together. That really is quite special. And I did not anticipate how much our company culture would change whenever we went from being local all together to being remote because whenever we did go remote, we were not moving far apart, like Cory and I still live about two hours apart. So it wasn't like we were on the other side of the country or anything like that. But our company culture definitely shifted a lot and it took us a long time to figure out one not even culture but communications. We were so used to distribute yelling across the room when we needed something or like we had a question or whatever it was, so that whenever we all went off We kind of struggled with this idea of how do we, how do we ask each other questions? Or how do we say that thing is done? What does that look like. And that's actually when we dove really hardcore into using Asana, the project management system that we use. And when we started using Slack, which is the team communication tool that we use, and I even remember, I had to hire someone. So an organization's specialists to come in and help me figure out how to figure out this communication piece with the team. So I had to bring in some outside help to help me wrap my head around it because I couldn't quite figure out how to do it on my own. And from there, we decided to do a couple of things such as having weekly meetings. So now we meet every single week, on Tuesday mornings for an hour to talk about all the business stuff for the week, behind and the week ahead, how to use Asana, and slack to communicate and manage projects and those sorts of things. And we've had to come up with some interesting ways to keep company culture going. Some things around like sharing Jeff's in Slack, which I feel like I could be better at doing that. Cobra is always really great at sharing some good gifts. Or, honestly, our being boss vacations has kind of turned into one of our company culture nurturing things that we do every year, as we all show up. There's always some, some team dinners that are happening, we all love putting that together and doing it, whether it's the vacations or the upcoming conference, like there is something going on behind the scenes with the being boss team that you guys don't even see that's like this whole other part and purpose that we create this event also for ourselves so that we can get together and hang out to everything. Another thing that Cory and I have also started doing recently as Cory is coming into town once a month, so that we can maintain that in person company culture. Though, I guess we need to put that dartboard up in the new office. Cory says, but I'm still mad that we don't get to play darts anymore, you should be happy because if you remember, I won. We kept cumulative scores, and I will never forget that I was shut down as me The winner is the winner. So I agree there are there are things that are not the same and will not be the same. When you take your team from remote or from in person local into remote workspace. It's a lot harder, I think, to allow people or to facilitate those. Those relationships and nurture the connections that you have with your teammates has to be significantly more intentional, as opposed to showing up and like hanging out all day every day. But I think it's possible. And I think the key is to find the pieces of your company culture that are most important to not only you, but also each of your employees, and each of your employees will be different. One of the ways that we did this sort of early on, I think this was maybe about a year after we went remote is I made everyone on the team do the love languages test to find out what their love language was, so that I can be sure that I was nurturing those relationships and the way that they most needed them nurtured. So there are things like that that you can do again, you have to be very intentional so that you are showing up for your team, and more thoughtful ways than you were doing when you were just all in the same office together. Home Cory says that he and David let me win that sweet that you think so. Rachel says I love keeping track and acknowledging slash checking in on team member birthdays and their partners, kids etc. Personal little things completely agree with that Rachel. And lucky Cory is at like summer solstice baby, which makes that very easy for me. So Cory, thank your mom for having you on the summer solstice. And Rachel also says that we just did love languages last week as a remote team. I think that though that love language test is one of my favorite ones for communicating effectively in terms of nurture nurturing relationships with your team, especially if you are remote. So hope that helps. Kim in terms of that question, because it's difficult. I think it's definitely I think it's harder. It's definitely harder to do that with a remote team. Especially if you are in many different places. I'm also lucky, you know, Cory is close enough to me as well that whenever we are actually traveling to where our parents live, Korea is in the middle. So sometimes we can stop in and have lunch or dinner with him because there's little things like that that are helpful with him being nearby and Kim, it's possible, I think that everyone will be staying local. So you guys can still get together every week for dinner or whatever it may be, in order to continue nurturing those relationships, but the work does change. So just be very mindful of what parts of that you want to keep what parts your employees really find beneficial and valuable. And work on those communication pieces. Because the communication will be different from local to remote office situations. I will also say to you and I actually say this, I think in an upcoming episode of making a business, I think it's the next one, I've already recorded. The next one, I talked about this a little bit. So if this is repetitive for anyone who listens to that in the future, you'll get over it, and it'll be fine. But one of the things that I note in there is that this company culture piece is it is the heart and soul of your business. And especially for the kinds of businesses that we build. It's not a part of your business that your customers ever really see. So for example, you guys don't really see the company culture that being boss has, you do a little bit and you probably have some Inklings, but you don't like you don't know what it's like, whenever we're all hanging out together. Or especially when we're having our team dinners in New Orleans, it's separate from all of all of the all of the attendees, or, or even like what's happening at Almanac, like I am working in the same office space with Almanac every single day. And yet that it is the heart and soul of our company, what you guys see on the outside the website, and the social media, even the packages that you have arrive at your doorstep, whatever it may be. That's just like a weird offshoot of what our company actually is. And I think that's such a fascinating idea that that really the job of the CEO of a company is about keeping the members of that company happy and healthy and productive and moving forward with the vision. And the objectives and all those things like that is the heart and soul what you guys see what the customers and consumers see is just like, almost an afterthought. And a lot of ways I think that's very, very fascinating. So just gonna throw that in there as well. Oh, man, such good questions from the bosses in the being boss community. I love how they show up and don't hold back asking really great questions that are really about doing business and no fluffy stuff here. If you're enjoying this episode, then you should know that I have something fun up my sleeves. On April 6, I'm rebooting 10 minutes to being boss, a weekly bite sized show for creative business owners where I'm answering questions from bosses like you giving actionable insights, tools and tactics and around 10 minutes, you can search for 10 minutes to be involved wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe now. And we'll have not one but three new episodes dropping on April 6. All right. Now we have another question from Kim. How do you determine the best KPIs which is key performance indicator for your business growth slash revenue? There are so many different things to track, how do you determine which ones are the most important, especially if you have multiple revenue streams. There are so many things you can track. But every business is different, like even two businesses in the exact same field can have completely different metrics that they are tracking. And this is fascinating to me. And the metrics that you are tracking says so much about what you find important in your business. And it even affects how it is that you are catering to your customers or clients. So this is an important piece. And it really just comes down to what is most important for you. And that's there is like a right or wrong answer. So for example, if your KPI is Instagram followers, like is that really the most important metric in your business? Um, there are certain businesses where it could be for sure, but that's usually a vanity metric. And so you have to stay away from vanity metrics for your KPIs. As much as pap as much as possible. So you can think of vanity metrics as the metrics that make you feel good but don't actually mean anything for your business. your Instagram followers and 99.9% of businesses out there is one There's metrics, where I have certainly seen people with 100,000 followers who are so broke and can't convert a single one of them. Likewise, I've seen instead or Instagram accounts with 500 followers, and the person who runs it is living a fine life, making as much money as they need from those 500 followers and whatever's happening outside of Instagram, making Instagram kind of a useless metric for 99.9% of businesses. So you need to think about what metrics in your business one that you care about? And to actually matter. How about that. So you can think I think every business, it is actually the definition of business, that you are watching your profit margins. So revenue, yes, profit margins, yes, times two. And I say definition of business, because that's why you're in business, it's to make money. If you weren't here to make money, you'd have a nonprofit, and you wouldn't be caring about making money, you just be doing good work. That's there's a fuzzy line around that. So is what it is. But you need to be tracking revenue, and profit. And then think about what other metrics are important to you. So Kim, I know that you run a design agency. So maybe for you is revenue and profit, in addition to you know, clients closed, every quarter, that can be a good sort of sr, metric to that revenue and profit point. You can also think about things like website traffic, so is your online marketing, actually converting into website traffic that would then potentially convert into new clients. So website traffic can be a really good one. website traffic can actually be in a couple of different places, too, you can do just like sheer pageviews, you could do. I always love a good bounce rate. And your bounce rate being the rate at which someone enters into your website and then bounces right back without visiting more than one page, you want your bounce rate to be low. So it's one of those metrics, you actually want that number to be as low as possible. And that's a metric of how interesting engaging your website is? Or are you getting the right people to your website. You can also think about things like, you know, for me, it's podcast downloads, Cory actually creates, sort of gathers all of our metrics for all of my KPIs every week, and then month, and puts them in a set of spreadsheets and then loads them into slack. So that I have, I have a dashboard that I can look at every single week, that shows me what all of my most important metrics are. And I'll even pull it open. Let me show you what my metrics are. So at the moment, one of them has conference ticket sales. And that's the thing too is your metrics can change depending on the season of business that you're in. I'm currently in like a conference ticket sales season. And so conference ticket sales is a metric that I want an update on every single week. Another one that we have, is the weekly community member count. Has it gone up? Has it gone down? Is it the same, just generally not engagement, not like how many people are posting none of those things, I can go check that out if I want to. But in terms of this dashboard, my KPI is number of community members. And then we also have a weekly podcast stats spreadsheet that he goes into every week, and lets us in puts in there how many episodes or how many downloads we've had in the past seven days, past 30 days and past 90 days, I believe, as well as total downloads, so we can see the rate at which the website is growing. And what do you also put what, like you also often tell us what podcasts are doing the best. So if anything has changed in our top 10 episodes, Cory will also update us on that. So it's a it's kind of getting long and rambly. And I get really excited about tracking metrics, but just choose the ones that are most important for you. And are actually metrics of growth and success. They are different for literally every single business. And we'll say a lot about what kind of business you're running and what is most important to you. So a little example of this is like the smallest little mindset shift. But I think you'll see why it's important is you could track how many clients you close in a quarter. Or you could track how many websites you launch in a quarter. So think about the difference between tracking clients gained and tracking clients completely. He did. kind of similar, but kind of a world of difference. That one little difference can say a lot about what kind of company you are trying to

Unknown: 35:57

grow.

Emily Thompson: 35:59

Just that little bitty shift. Okay, have some comments over here. Colleen says, I use the track your metrics worksheet from being boss isn't a good one. To track several things throughout the year, monthly profit loss, cash summary and clients I worked on lists, subscribers and tracked hours. Those are some good ones Coleen, I seriously can't live without it on my wall as an overall metrics view each day. That is wonderful. It's really helpful to see trends year to year as well completely agree. That's one of my favorite things about having things loaded up in spreadsheets, especially, but also in worksheets. And we've talked about that around CEO day, or the CEO day kit, there's sort of magic to having these worksheets filled out every single year. So you can go see what growth is like year to year. So I love that. And Kim says thanks, definitely love the little mindset shift on tracking, right? It can be whatever you want it to be, but be thoughtful about it and then track it. So we literally have what's the word I'm looking for repeating, we literally have sort of repeating to dues and Asana so that every week, Cory is tasked with gathering this information and sharing it with me, you can do this yourself. I'm also tasked with ever being to do to actually review it, so that I remember to look at it every week as well. But you can use your project management software to prompt you to gather this information. And it can be as easy to as just logging in and looking at your website stats. It's really important to be able to gather a bird's eye view quickly so that you can make decisions, either on the fly or gather information to make more thoughtful decisions as needed. Next up, we have a question from Stephanie Peterson, I'd love to hear your thoughts on coldish outreach to generate new business referrals have been huge for me, but I need to bring in some new customers as well. I am a fan of doing cold outreach, with the right intention and expectations. How about that, because it's going to be very, very different. So let's start with intentions. Whenever you're doing cold outreach, the first thing that you should want to do is not to sell, but to help. And that's kind of the same thing if you do the selling, right. Good helping will lead into selling, but you want to form a relationship, nurture a relationship and then sell. So the intention is not to like just convert someone immediately, because that's probably not going to happen. The only time that ever really happens is if one, they're like you are a gift from the universe, if you landed in their inbox on the day that they were telling their business partner that all they needed with someone like you, then like, yeah, you're going to convert them. And that's going to be amazing. That doesn't happen super often. or two, they've actually already seen your stuff elsewhere. So but that's not even cold, you just you cold pitch, but you're actually kind of maybe a little warm to them. Um, so only really in those two cases, are you ever going to immediately convert a cold pitch. There are probably other cases too. But those are really the only two. So you have to go into it with the idea that you were actually there to form and nurture a relationship based on anything, all kinds of things. It could be anything I actually was doing. I had a girl in a mastermind, this last round that I did, and she wanted to work with organizations that had to do with animals, and specifically horses shows she was a web developer and wanted to do web development projects with equestrian clubs, let's say let's get it pretty narrow. And so she was going to start doing called pitching to these equestrian clubs. And it wasn't a matter of her going in and saying you have a crappy website. I'm making a new one. It's more like You know what, I love horses and I'm so grateful that there are companies in the world that are doing things like you are beginning a conversation not about websites, not about bettering your business, not about any of those things, but a mutual love of horses and it's a really great example of how you can go in to form a relationship based on basically anything and then see where the conversation goes. You can direct it as needed, and then

Unknown: 40:42

pitch

Emily Thompson: 40:43

so intention, you're going to help first form relationship and then sell second expectations, you have to go into a very clear expectations. And here are a couple that I think you should adopt

Unknown: 40:59

one.

Emily Thompson: 41:01

One out of 25 cold pitches will get a reply. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, you're not going to have even half of the people you called pitch to reply back to you. Most likely, unless it is the most aligned and beautiful thing for so many people. So don't get disheartened when you get 24 nose or 24 crickets. And one No, thank you. Because that's maybe that one reply that you get. And then you get back up and yeah, keep doing it. So that's an expectation, too, it's probably going to take more than one email. Whenever I'm cold pitching. I don't do this very often. But I definitely do. I've recently went through a round of cold pitching for brands for the being boss conference for brand partnerships and sponsorships. And even if I don't hear something from someone, I'll email them two or three times before I sort of put it in the pile of this isn't happening right now. So it becomes a thing where you have to not only cold pitch them one time, but multiple times. And another one is get ready to one here knows to babies but threes. I've heard of people getting some nasty emails from some cold pitches. So you can't go into cold budging, being like faint of heart, or being easily having your ego easily bruised, or whatever it may be. You have to you have to go into it as you just landed in somebody's inbox asking some weird questions and they are probably busy or don't care or just deleted it or you probably just landed in junk and never actually made it to their inbox anyway. So intention, expectations. But it also totally think that you should do it. Because I have gotten some really great connections from actually is even like an expectation piece. You may not actually get out of a relationship, what you want to like what you go in there to get. So you may go in there wanting to book a new client. But what you may get is a new business partner, or they may have a resource for some cool sunglasses that you've been looking for. Or something like that. It could be anything, anything come out of actually even tell you. I called pitch Kathleen back in the day. I think one of the first emails I ever sent her was as a web designer. She had gone freelance now I was following her on her blog. I can't remember I think maybe we had been instagramming Instagram commenting or blog commenting at this point. So maybe this isn't completely cold but even warm. I went into it I she was doing branding. I offered her my web design services, in case she ever wanted to, you know, pass her web design people off or work with me to develop websites that she was designing or something she's like, No, thanks. Not interested. Look at us now. You never ever know. Rachel says yes. And always focus on there. What's in it for me? Oh, what's in it for me? As in what's in it for them? Yes. Like make it about what's in it for them? Not what's in it for you? Stephanie says awesome advice. Thank you relationship building is huge. Yes, it is. and Lindsey says very reassuring info on cold calling. I think it's just something that you do sometimes. And again, make it about building relationship. Don't even think about it as cold calling. Think about it as like reaching out to someone that you may want to be friends with. Business friends, it can be business friends, that's fine. But start there. I think you'll be much happier with the results. I do love some cold pitching. I like talk no who likes who likes it? really nobody.

Unknown: 45:00

No one likes it.

Emily Thompson: 45:02

But I do I do have plenty of stories of people who have done cold pitching of like, think about your hot shit 200 list. You make a list of 200 people that you want to work with or collaborate with or whatever. We have a worksheet for this, that we will stick in the show notes. But you create this lesson you start cold pitching and I've talked to many bosses who have started doing this hidden who either ended up on that podcast that they wanted to be on or books that client that they wanted to book or whatever it may be cold pitching can absolutely get you results if you're really in for it. Right Caroline says oh hacia 205 forgotten how good a resource that is. I literally picked up the hot sheet 200 list and did it again for myself. Four weeks ago, something like that. It's still a tool that I use. It's very, it's very important to sit down. Sometimes you just think like, Where do I want to go next? Who do I want to collaborate with next? Who are those dream clients that I want want to work with next? There's just something about energetically going for that next thing, thinking about what's next that like, takes you there. Okay, so if you're a boss listening to this and you're feeling like you totally want to be having creative business jobs like this, or have a safe place to ask these kinds of business questions, then come check out our online community at being boss to being boss community is filled with thoughtful questions, helpful bosses and plenty of resources to help you in your business. You can learn more and come check us out at being boss club slash community. Thanks for listening. And hey, if you want more resources, we're talking worksheets, free trainings in person meetups and vacations and more. Go to our website at www dot beam boss dot class. Do the work be boss