As I round the corner into this ninth year of podcasting, and after over 700 episodes, today I’m announcing a pause for both shows.

Listen in to hear what factors helped me reach this decision across time, money, energy, depressing industry articles, the pace of both shows’ growth, and mix of additional business factors that make this an important moment to pause and regroup. You might also appreciate the even deeper dive with my longtime friend (and first coach) Adrian Klaphaak in Pivot episode 360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts.

“I don’t get on the airplane—and definitely not the stage—unless all invoices are paid in full.”

When my friend and fellow keynote speaker Joey Coleman said this to me over coffee, I started drilling him for details: *Really?! How do you have the nerve to say that to a speaking client?! How do you avoid caving in to make sure their event doesn’t fall apart if they haven’t paid in time? What about clients who work for highly bureaucratic companies that insist on their “standard” net-120 terms?*

In this illuminating conversation, Joey shares his best practices for getting paid on time—every time by setting, stating, and upholding better boundaries (and contracts) with clients.

What mysterious ingredients make a book launch successful? What number of first-week and first-year sales truly make a difference to a book’s longevity? What can you do to turn lagging numbers around?

These vexing questions set today’s guest on a quest to examine a dataset of five years of book sales data across 6,775 titles in business and self-help to find answers—and he did.

In a flagship illuminating post for the industry, Todd Sattersten, publisher and owner of Bard Press, shared his findings in The Magic Number. In this behind-the-business conversation from October 2023, you’ll hear him generously talk me through how I could help Free Time get there—with a much-needed morale boost at the end.

Laura Mae Martin has a fascinating role as the Executive Productivity Advisor at Google in the Office of the CEO—one that she helped create six years ago (with big thanks to Jenny Wood for introducing us!). She coaches Google’s top executives on the best ways to manage their time and energy and sends out a weekly productivity newsletter that reaches over fifty thousand employees.

Today we’re talking about her forthcoming book, Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing. We discuss what the most senior-level executives do differently when it comes to time management (and what they still struggle with), five strategies for saying no, taming inbox stress with The Laundry Method, cozy corners, pairing activities with certain locations (hot spots and not spots), and what differentiates truly excellent executive assistants.

While the title of this episode, The Framework Framework™ is tongue-in-cheek, I’m pulling this out of the BFF bonus vault because it’s one of the community’s favorites.

I’m sharing the first steps to how you can set up a framework to help bolster your IP and your business; either by scaling through programs like certification and licensing, and to make your material more memorable and accessible to the groups you care most about reaching.

What do you do when you lose your biggest client? Today, I bring you part two of the What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client compilation. If you haven’t already, listen to 264: What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client (Part One) — and save these links for a rainy day!

The next time you’re going through something challenging in your business, remember: you are not alone! I hope you find comfort through the voices of some of my dearest friends, former podcast guests, and favorite Heart-Based Business owners who are speaking from experience about how they've handled situations just like this.

What do you do when you lose your biggest client? That was my Spotify search query for podcast episodes on this topic in the summer of 2023. It came up empty—there was not a single podcast episode on this topic. Of course not. Who wants to admit out loud and in their archives that they've lost their biggest client. In the past, I probably wouldn't have fessed up to this either. Except for the fact that now it's what I wish I could see, read and hear. Today’s compilation episode is here to fix that!