Do you have an ideal client avatar? 

Most of the people I talk to either don’t have one, or don’t really know what their avatar is. This topic gets talked about to no end and is often used in conjunction with others things you HAVE to do in business. But you know what I’ve noticed? Most of the people telling you that you need to nail down your ideal client don’t really tell you how to do that or why it’s important. So I am here to help you do that today! 

Having an ideal client avatar is important for many reasons but mostly it’s because you need to understand the way that person thinks. In order to sell anything you have to solve a problem and speak to what are called “pain points”, these are things that cause someone stress in life. These pain points need to be strong enough that people will pay money to fix them. For example: if you are a coach and help business owners decide where to go in their business...

Are you hoarding opinions?

One of my favorite quotes is, “opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and chances are they all stink.”

This is something I tell my clients on a pretty regular basis when I catch them getting hung up on the opinion of someone else. I call this opinion hoarding because you are holding on to something that is not helping you and should have been thrown out! I see it happen in lots of the Facebook groups I’m in, people ask for opinions on their pricing, services, and branding. It happens constantly!

Don’t get me wrong there is a time and place for everything, including opinions, but opinions should be reserved for market research on a product or feedback when a customer buys something from you. Getting opinions on things like your pricing from people who could potentially be your customers is like a Grocery store asking customers what they want to pay for their produce. If you give potential customers the...

Because we are in a new year, most of us have goals that we intend to work towards throughout 2020. This is great but did you know that 80% of people do not meet their goals? This could be for several reasons like; lack of motivation, not being clear enough on the goal, lack of time, or just laziness. But what if I told you that there is a secret to accomplishing your goals? 

Goals are actually pretty easy to tackle if you go about it the right way. Far too often we shoot for the moon and forget to create a “launch plan” to get us there. The other issue I see often is setting goals for 12 months or more down the road. While it’s fine to have 12 month goals, you need to remember that it can be really hard to not get discouraged or sidetracked in 12 months. This is why I recommend setting goals in 90 day increments!

Setting goals for 3 months down the road is a lot more digestible and helps you take steps now to realize those goals. Setting goals...

Everyone is talking about their year in review right now. 

This is something that happens every year but for some reason this time it feels different. I’m not sure if I am becoming more self aware, or if it’s just because my life is so drastically different this New Year in comparison to all the ones before it. However, I wanted to talk about some of the things I learned in 2019. 

The biggest lesson for me in 2019 was patience. Now I know that this is an ongoing lesson and it is repeated often. But if you don’t already know this, I had my daughter the day before Christmas 2018, so 2019 was my first year as a biological mom (I have a wonderful step-son already). As I’m sure you can imagine, having a child requires a whole new level of patience! Lucky for me I am the LEAST patient person in the whole entire world. So needless to say, I struggled severely! 

Not only did I learn patience in my personal life through my daughter,...

As an OBM, I am no stranger to SOP’s. In fact, I am an SOP junkie and believe that one of the many keys to success in business is to have a solid foundation of SOP’s. So what are SOP’s anyway? Well SOP is short for Standard Operating Procedure, these are a list of steps needed to complete a task. Step by step instructions if you will.

Now you might think, “Melissa, why do I need SOP’s in my business. Things are running fine already!”. Maybe your business has 1, 10, or 50 people already and you are operating smoothly without these step by step instructions, but how do you intend to maintain quality and standard as you grow to a 1000 person company? Better yet, are you even sure you are maintaining quality right now?

I remember before I started my business I worked for a business finance company in their legal department. This role required I do everything a very specific way and it was done the exact same way every single time....

If you are in the online space and are a service provider you have probably come into contact with one of the biggest dilemmas service based businesses have, time! How do you scale a business when you literally have no more time? 

This is something I run into pretty often as an Online Business Manager and the most recent solution is creating an online course. However, in an ever growing space, online courses need to be done correctly and marketed effectively in order to be worth the time and money investment. You also can’t come to the table with a “build it and they will come” attitude, it just doesn’t work that way. So I am going to provide you with some tips to help you determine if creating an online course is the right move for you and your business! 

First things first, come up with 3 topics you could create a course around. For example, if you are a business coach, you might have a course on social media strategy or how to gain more...