No entrepreneur goes straight up the ladder to success. And no entrepreneur achieves success without investing in themselves. But how do you know what’s an investment in yourself and your business and what’s just spending money?

A lot of people wonder, won’t shorter project timelines result in less valuable work for the client? Not only is that not true, but it’s actually the exact opposite. We have found that you can deliver more value in less time. If you play your cards right. Today I’m going to tell you why.

Do you feel stuck charging low prices for your work? Do you feel like people around you just don't ever want to pay more than you're asking for? Well, that may be because you are stuck thinking about yourself and pitching yourself as a freelancer. If you want to charge higher and higher prices–those premium prices that everybody's talking about–then you need to evolve from a freelancer into an expert.

After many years in business, many nights stressing about money, and lots of personal work to shift how I felt about that security I was chasing, I have come to a very different conclusion about what it means to feel financially secure. What I’ve realized is that it’s not about how much money you’re making in a month or in a year, or even how much money you have in the bank. None of those things is going to make you feel secure if you don’t know how to generate money.

People tell us that building an entire brand in one to three days is impossible because they have no idea how long it’s going to take to do their brilliant creative work. I get it. Steve used to spend upward of 60 hours on just a logo. But we’ve honed our process and we deliver high value for our clients. And I know you can do it too. So how do you deliver for your clients and maintain boundaries on your time so your business is actually profitable?

Productizing your services is a hell of a great way to run a business, make better money and live a more sustainable life. But like any business model, there are constraints. Where are those constraints? And what value or opportunities might be left on the table when you productize?

After listening to Rochelle Moulton and Jonathan Stark talk about productized services on their podcast, I knew I had to invite them over to dig into it some more. We’ll talk about constraints of the model for a small agency and where we’ll have to agree to disagree.

I am avidly against retainer clients for small agency owners. In this episode, I tell you exactly why I think they give a false sense of security and are the absolutely wrong strategy to implement if you want more profit and more freedom in your life.

When you want to make more money without working more hours, what’s the first thing you think to do? You focus on the money. You raise your prices or you bring on more clients, maybe even both. But when you focus on the money, it can actually end up being the reason you get stuck working all the time without making enough.

I’m sharing how we turned the long, laborious, awful sales process that most small agencies go through to try to close a client into a simple 15 minute conversation and we close people on the spot.

What does shifting from the old default model of working with clients to using the No BS Agency model actually look like? Super badass business owner Jennifer Anastasi is here to tell us. In this episode, she reveals how she implemented the model that changed everything for her — from projects that dragged on for six or nine months at a time to projects that were delivered in just a couple of days intensive.

When I tell people that we have eliminated the revisions process and that clients accept our deliverables without revisions, they’re both amazed and highly skeptical. Today I’m letting you in on how we do this and how it’s not just a better path to creating a more profitable business, but it’s a better path with better results for your clients too.

What’s the BS that we eliminated when we say “No BS”? That’s what we’re talking about today, plus how we were able to do it without duplicating work or sacrificing quality.

In the creative agency space, almost everyone follows a long proposal writing process in order to win a client. It’s all well and good if you close the sale. But if you don’t, all that time spent writing a proposal for one client is lost. I knew I had to stop spending so much time and energy writing proposals for clients who were never going to close. So I quit doing proposals for free. And you can too.

It's the beginning of January, which means a lot of us are thinking about goals and what we really want our next year to look like. How do you set yourself up so that you don’t simply come intentions for the year and do them for a couple of weeks and forget about them? How do you actually set yourself up to achieve those things in the next twelve months?

For the past year, I have been building the no BS Agency Mastery Program, and in 2022 I plan to go all-in and take it to new heights. I take you behind-the-scenes about this decision and the actions I plan on taking next year.

The truth is the agency life is hard. When you’re running an agency, the hustle is constant and you really don’t have much work-life balance. Which is one reason why Steve and I had to create another way forward.

I want to take you back to how this all started—the challenges and opportunities that Steve and I experienced that led us to change our business model so drastically, and why we turned the way we do business on its head.

Do you ever make assumptions, and let them dictate what you do next? Of course you do, we all do! Now is your chance to start noticing those assumptions and changing the story. In this episode, I chat with friend and mentor Julia Pimsleur on how even small shifts in your mindset can have big impacts in your business and your life.

Hillary Weiss is on a mission to help more small businesses define their “statement piece”, a.k.a. the bold point of view that makes them radically relevant to their perfect people. in this episode, we talk about finding that thing that makes you special in the world, using process to showcase the value, and using visual cues to communicate it online.

When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re in a constant state of not knowing. There is always more to learn. You can’t know everything because the landscape is always changing. Getting comfortable with not knowing is a big step to building resilience.