According to SignalFire, the fastest growing type of small business is one that revolves around content creation, also known as the creator economy. There are over 50 million independent content creators and counting: About two million are professionals making content full-time (and earning a living from it), and the remaining 48 million are “Amateur Individual Creators,” monetizing content creation part-time.

In this conversation, Kim Kaupe and I explore favorite tips and tools for designing our calendar to support creative work, strategies for staying consistent, paying for accountability, “fishing where your fish are,” batching to get more done in less time, and how Kim prepared for her successful Shark Tank pitch several years ago.

Your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit got you here. Smarter systems will take you there.

There is less friction in your operations and a greater focus on joyful work.

There is a spacious calendar where you are free to dedicate time to your most compelling, strategic projects — the ones that best express your unique talents, powered by a Delightfully Tiny Team.

It’s time to stop working full time and start working free time: by applying agile operating principles toward building smarter systems, starting with a centralized business operations dashboard if you don’t already have one.

If you’re a business owner thinking, “My platform is too small to land sponsors,” today’s guest will encourage you to think again. Instead of counting yourself out purely because of the numbers—consider shifting your mindset from how you can help brands to how you can serve your audience best.

In this conversation, sponsorship coach Justin Moore shares his hard-earned wisdom on forming mutually beneficial partnerships between brands and creators. He shares tons of tactics on the power of specificity, creative partnership approaches, why you shouldn’t put prices in your media kit, the halo effect, and so much more. As Justin says when it comes to working with brand partners, “You’re not just a creator; you are a consultant.”

There’s a missing chapter in Free Time that, over the course of editing, got condensed down into a single bullet point. When someone new joins your team, even part-time, those first few days, weeks, and months have potential to transform your manager manual—in ways that you would otherwise miss. I encourage you to share this episode with your new team members as they join!

For many of us running Delightfully Tiny Teams, the ideal team set-up is one where no one works full time — including the owner. Today Kaneisha Grayson returns to the pod to share with her signature transparency her lessons learned about onboarding part-time team members, designing effective hiring and vetting processes, teaching sales skills, and scaling without breaking the bank. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our previous conversation in episode 131: Scaling Your Joy While Streamlining Business Overhead and Navigating ADHD.

How do you define enough? Today, Jenny is sharing a bonus episode from the private BFF podcast feed where she’s talking about how to refocus on what enough looks like, and how you can celebrate exactly where (and who) you already are—in business and in life.

Do we really all have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé? That’s our tongue-in-cheek title, pulled from Tara McMullin’s new book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting, for a recent Spotify Live conversation.

In this replay, Charlie Gilkey, Tara McMullin, and I explore the nuances of calculating time, money, and energy capacity so that we don’t tip into boredom or burnout. We share strategies for saying no, and discuss the costs of saying yes when we shouldn’t.

You’ve heard the term low-hanging fruit: the easiest thing you can do to make the biggest possible impact in your business. But not all fruit is created equal!

Sometimes, those low-hanging fruits are modest peaches or distracting, underperforming pumpkins (in Mike Michalowicz parlance) that might not be worth pursuing.

Other times, you’re so close to your own business that you can’t see the enormous, juicy, low-hanging watermelon you’re about to walk right into.

What do you do when your business model is no longer working for you? When your current income streams and activities are not just tiring but draining you to the point of exhaustion? My guest today, Tara McMullin, is someone I have long admired for her willingness to question dominant narratives about how things should be done, instead emphasizing what works for each individual person and business.

In this conversation, Tara shares her journey of making one of the toughest decisions in her business. As heart- and gut-wrenching as it was to make, it freed her energy for deep work that is even more aligned with her interests, energy, and identity of who she’s most excited to become. She gave herself permission long ago to drop the “expert/guru” model and focus on asking bigger, bolder, better questions instead.