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As the midpoint of the year will escape us due to the break, we thought we'd check in with our yearly intentions. How are we doing? What's working? What's not working so well? What have we learnt so far? What else would we add? See you in a month! In the meantime, you can buy VORACIOUS here, and sign up to The Spark here.

Kimba Cooper is a gamification specialist, who works with businesses to help them get results - ethically. If you don't know what gamification is, don't worry - she goes into it fully in the episode! But essentially, it's a fascinating motivation tool with so many applications in small business and general life too. If you want to see the world totally differently - press play!

Tumbleweeds in the sales department can be scary, and the default reactions can be panic and or despair. These are totally understandable reactions, but today we wanted to give you a helping hand with some other things to do when the going gets tough and sales are slow - think of it as a virtual hug, with some whispered advice too! 

Do you know your brand's tone of voice? Have you ever thought about it? Having an idea of your tone of voice can make it a lot easier to write content, copy, captions and more for your business, and it can even help your visuals too! Here's how you can find it...

In today’s episode, we have the absolute pleasure of chatting to Le’Nise Brothers, founder of Eat Love Move. As the author of You Can Have A Better Period (and host of the Period Story podcast), yoga teacher at Frame, and registered nutritionist, we knew we wanted to chat to her all about holistic health as small business owners (and, just as, human beings!) A huge part of what she talked about was menstrual cycle syncing, and she blew our tiny minds with her wisdom. Prepare yourself - now dive right in!

Today we welcome website designer and copywriter Alice Writes Copy to talk all things websites! Alice has a holistic approach to website design that blew our minds (in the best way). It was so good, in fact, that we nearly didn't edit this podcast in time to release it, instead very nearly choosing to just implement her wisdom on our own sites. But we didn't do that, because we love you!!!  Alice gave us an overview of how your business works in a lifestyle-first way, and 3 top tips to takeaway too. 

Ah, productivity - you're a cruel mistress. As two small business owners who love learning and getting the most out of every day, for so long we've been searching for productivity hacks that will finally allow us to perfect our day. But we've decided we're calling time on 'productivity' as we know it: and instead of focusing on maximising output, we're gonna focus on maximising input. Instead of doing the most, we're gonna do what you can, and have fun with it. Here's how we're doing it!

Content creation can be stressful at the best of times, but at the moment you might be feeling some definite ~ vibes ~ where it's feeling even worse!! Today we're chatting all about what to do when it feels like that: how to still show up for your business (if you want to), in a way that feels good for you (which is a must-do!) We talked to some of our brilliant podcast pals, including Vix Meldrew, Elizabeth Stiles, Nerrisa Pratt, Alice Benham, and Laura-Jane Illustrations, for their thoughts too. 

To round off the first podcast section of this year, we finished with one of our favourite people in the whole entire world: Sasha Glasgow from Frank+Feel. She's a writer and host of journaling workshops, and we had the pleasure of chatting all about journaling, morning routines, and how she looks out for the prompts and words that resonate. Sasha was frank, heartfelt, and brilliant - we hope you love it as much as we do!

If you often look at the world of business coaching and advice, and think - but this just doesn't feel like it's ME - then we think you'll love this episode. As a gentle visibility coach, Suzy Darke helps women run soulful, tender-hearted small businesses that want to connect and make impact in a way that works for them. Suzy is full to the brim with brilliant analogies, permission slips, and wisdom to help small business life seeming not only manageable, but magical too, without having to ever sell your soul. @suzydarke suzydarke.co.uk

Today we're joined by lovely Laura Jane, of Laura Jane Illustrations & Hello Happee. We chat all about how a personal interest in self-care led to 270k people following her on instagram for her mindful creativity and illustration (spoiler alert: it's wholesome af.) But it's also real, and amongst other things she introduces us to her idea of restorative self-care and energetic self-care. Looking for an audio hug? This is it!

We know, we know. You can't believe your eyes! Finally, the episode about Profit First has finally landed! Well, just you wait til your ears get round to it...we hope you enjoy it! We've mentioned Mike Michalowicz's Profit First many a time on the podcast, but today we deepdive on how Rachel implemented it in her biz as a real life case study, and how it's helped transform her business finance. LET'S GO! You can get Profit First as both a book an audiobook, if you want to look into it yourself.

Say hello to today's guest, the wholesale wizard - otherwise known as Therese Ørtenblad, founder of Small Business Collaborative! If you're curious about whether wholesale would work as a next step for your small business, she has the answer. We chatted about what types of business suit wholesale best, how to get started, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls. Plus, why Therese thinks it's an ideal way to sell if you're an introvert! Follow Therese at @small_business_collaborative & follow us @businessproposalpodcast

Sound the returning guest klaxon! Nerrisa Pratt is back on the pod. We first had her on as the founder of creative PR company Untld Project, but today she's come back as serial crafter, sewist, and founder of the Bargello Edit. We had a really wonderful chat with her all about the creation and publication of her book (oh yeah, did we mention she has a craft book? *Nails emoji*), how she uses craft in her life, and the boundaries she's putting in place as an industrious multi-hyphenate in big bad 2022. We talk about the importance of your own space, showing up authentically, and using what you've got.  Follow @nerrisapratt & check out @thebargelloedit  

Whether you grew up on the business book fodder of the 90s and 00s or the Buzzfeed quizzes of the 00s and 10s - we're all gluttons for finding out our personality types. We share our results from 4 different personality tests, and discuss the valuable insights for our business that we got from each - as well as the limitations of what they offered us. Take the tests yourself and let us know what you get! Sparketype test 16 Personalities The Enneagram Keirsey's Four Temperaments

Happy New Year! 2022, here we, here we, here we go... Before we kick off the new year proper, we wanted  to take a moment to reflect on 2021 and the Small Bizmas Party we hosted in December alongside our brill small biz pal, Alice Benham.  Today the 3 of us are listening to the wins you recorded for us at the event, and taking some time to celebrate everything YOU achieved in such a challenging year. Thanks so much our amazing guests - we can't wait to see where 2022 takes you! https://www.huckletree.com/education/alpha https://www.huckletree.com https://www.instagram.com/huckletree/ https://www.thebigredbox.co

For the FINAL episode of 2021, we thought we'd hand the decision making over to you! Last week we asked for your subject requests, and lovely listener Hanna asked us to talk about some of the instances when our perspectives on something totally shifted over time. We talk about starting new, scary projects, talking to camera, presenting in workshops, slimming offerings down, going back to learning, organising ourselves and more: basically, some of the most seismic things that have changed for us in our entire business lives!  Grab your tickets for Small Bizmas here!  

In this chunk's - and 2021's - penultimate episode, we thought we'd have a bit of a sentimental one reflecting on the year gone by, and look at what it brought us and how we felt it went. Then, we thought we'd look forward to 2022, and what we're hoping it will bring! Plus, for each half we took a prompt from the Goodbye 2021, Hello 2022 journal from Project Love (out now.)  Grab your tickets for Small Bizmas 2021 here Plus, please email us thebusinessproposalpodcast@gmail.com to suggest next week's episode topic - the final of this year!!! - by Monday 22nd November

It’s been a long couple of years for us business owners -- the elf-employed if you will! We're SO proud of everything you’ve achieved and with that in mind, we’ve decided to throw a party for small business owners who want a chance to relax and unwind with the people who well and truly GET it. So join us, Rachel Waring & Ellie Kime, alongside our pal Alice Benham, fellow business owner and podcaster who lives and breathes small business ownership, for an evening of food, drink, music, activities, a Big Fat Quiz Of The Year (with prizes!) and, above all, just great vibes. How does that sound? Tickets are limited and available now!  You can find all the info and grab your ticket with the link below  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/smallbizmas/ and if you want to get involved as a supplier, please let us know here: https://forms.gle/QAksfaxDnEJb383m7  This party is being thrown as a collaboration between Starting The Conversation and The Business Proposal Podcast.

With Black Friday (and Black Thursday, and Cyber Monday, and all the crew) just round the corner, you might be thinking about your sales strategy. Discount codes, money off, slashed prices - these are all the traditional ways big businesses advertise on Black Friday. But is this the way it has to be for small businesses too? We chat about the pros and cons of Black Friday, as well as some alternatives you might want to try instead (if you want to opt in at all, that is. If you want to opt out - we totally understand too!)