Bridging the Burnout Gap with Emily Thompson

<p>Emily Thompson’s experience starting the <a href="https://beingboss.club/" target="_blank">Being Boss podcast</a> in 2015 is a strong argument for why you should <i>always</i> plan for success. She and her “business bestie” Kathleen Shannon started the podcast as a way of taking the conversations they were having about their businesses and being entrepreneurs into the public realm—and if they happened to promote their respective branding agency and web design shop in the meantime, well then, hey: that’s a bonus! </p><p>But a few months in and they were already getting ads. A little while later, they casually launched getaway events like the Being Boss Vacation and signed a book deal. The podcast was taking on a life of its own. </p><p>Emily was already a successful web designer: she had gotten her start with her Etsy store, having fallen in love with the idea of selling handmade things online. It was during this time that she became “enamored with branding,” and diving deep into who she was serving and why they should care about her business. Eventually, she took her expertise and passion to other business people. She graduated from offering pointers on online banners to running Indie Shopography, her web design agency for more than a decade.</p><p>So when it came time to launch Being Boss, it was a bit of a lark. “We had no business plan. We were just starting a podcast.” Emily and Kathleen went through the usual steps they’d take with any client—from the name, branding, website, and content buckets—but initially, they didn’t plan to monetize their passion project. </p><p>Their sudden success may sound amazing, but Emily cautions that it was “actually overwhelming.” The two of them experimented with a lot of different business tactics when they were building up the podcast, looking to see “what would stick.” Things weren’t always easy-breezy: their foray into Facebook Ads was a colossal failure, so bad they didn’t even do their customary postmortem. (Emily files aspects of their experiments under “what worked