Guest Podcast: Business Podcast Secrets (Failing To Success)

I chose to triple down on my personal brand because I wanted me and who I was to outlive the business. Eventually, value turns into an impressions and eyeballs and trust. We'll turn into money. Focus on building an audience and when you build an audience, you monetize it. The podcast for me was not meant to make money. I think it was meant to build out a community today on the show. I'm happy to have stopped clearing. He's the founder of the success story podcast. They are a top 10 business podcasts, much larger than mine. Stop. Happy having you on today. I'm very grateful to come on. Thank you. Thank you. No, and I've just been doing it for longer. That's it. Yours is going to get there. So don't worry. The style. What is the model behind your podcast? I know we spoke about like how I monetize. I want to hear how you do it and how it works. So I think that it's important to understand my mindset going into the podcast. So when I started a podcast, I was still building a business and I knew that business was going to be acquired at some point. So I chose to triple down on my personal brand because I wanted me and who I was to outlive the business because I saw a lot of people unless you have a seriously significant acquisition event or exit event, meaning like 50 million, 100 million plus where or you're just in some super innovative niche. I think that the second you sell a company, you're forgotten and you have to start from scratch. So I was looking at the Gary visa, the world that built massive audiences and they get they were able to just launch products again, again, against this audience that trusted them explicitly. And that's really what I wanted to build. When I first started, I did not start a podcast to achieve a business objective. I started a podcast to build a community or build a tribe or whatever you want to call it just to get as many eyeballs just to know who I am as possible. And I knew that if I did that for a long enough period of time, there would be some financial benefit to doing that. And that's really the mindset that I had going in started off as a sales and marketing focused podcast because that was really where my career was at the time and then it evolved to it's interesting how a podcast evolves with you because it mirrors the conversations and the interest that you have as a host. So as I went through my career journey and my life journey and the company was acquired and I wanted to keep the podcast going obviously because I was a purpose, I started to dive into more diverse topics. So it wasn't just sales and marketing, it was just business, entrepreneurship, it could be personal, professional development, upskilling, all these different things that I found interesting that I realized that I had to learn and incorporate into my life to be successful in anything that I did and what and these are all topics that and ideas that helped me become successful in business but also in relationships and life and everything. So yeah, there was no goal to productize the podcast, it was to build the largest audience possible that loved my content, learned from my content, give as much value as possible and then eventually value turns into an impressions and eyeballs and trust will turn into money if you keep it up for long enough, it's not the quickest way to monetize, but I think it's one of the most fulfilling ways and it's one of the ways that could have outsized exponential returns in the long run if you do it for long enough because to productize right away what you're doing is there's no issue with that because I think that's smart for some people that want to use a podcast for a very specific business objective but it ends up being a little bit more transactional up front and you're not going to build a cast as wide a net because it doesn't serve you to cast as wide a net and to reach all these other people and all of the adjacent categories or have all these incillery discussions that don't benefit targeting somebody who's going to buy your product or service for your business. So again, focus on building an audience and when you build an audience you monetize it and if you're not selling a product, course, widget, SaaS, CPG, what do you have nothing to sell that you sell impressions so it was just advertiser revenue coming in and that's really been how the podcast had been self-sustaining for the past six years really focused on landing major advertisers. I've worked with incredible brands, I've worked with HubSpot for almost three years now, worked with NetSweets, worked with Indeed, worked with LinkedIn as well, these are some of the bigger ones. There's ones like Athletic Greens, I'm a big fan of their product, work with them, I know a whole bunch of other smaller brands that are more niche but it was really just attracting great advertisers that resonated with me personally and also resonated with the audience and then use a trust and report that a goat by audience to bring great products in front of them. And again, that's one way to monetize, it's definitely not the quickest way to make a ton of money. But the podcast for me was not meant to make money, it was meant to, I think it was meant to build out a community that later on I could use to launch again, products for services like I said. So it's achieving that objective and the money that it makes really just gets rolled back into production and growth of the show, I don't really need to take the money out of the show. And I think that obviously that's a very, very good position and privilege position that I'm in. But that was part of the strategy and that's also why I didn't just quit a job to start a podcast which is a whole other conversation about good entrepreneurship and best practices for entrepreneurship because I found ways to sane myself so that doing the thing that I love could eventually turn into a full-time thing, but it didn't matter if it took a little while to get there, which I just think is a healthy way to think about entrepreneurship in general. So yeah, that's how I looked at monetizing it and building it out. How far into it before larger advertisers started becoming a piece of the sponsor here? About three years, about two and a half, three years, about two and a half, like when I was about, I'm just trying to think, about 100,000 downloads a year is when the bigger advertisers started to approach. There was like one off before, but we're talking like a couple hundred bucks and they weren't renewing or they just weren't significant or they weren't long-term, like some of the brands that I just mentioned, they're like year-long engagements or multi-year-long engagements. And that was about 100,000 downloads about three years there. What are you at today? Like, how much traction and download are you getting on the podcast? I get between 700,000 to a million downloads a month across YouTube and audio. It ranges. Summer's a little bit slower right now. We're sitting on the lower end of that number, but we've been higher before in podcast land. You'll see peaks and valleys and summer is usually the quietest. For me, I'm hoping that we can like surpass that going into September, October, November. Also very fortunate that the podcast is actually syndicated now through cheddar. So I'm not counting and what cheddar is a major financial news media company. And they stream on Amazon Prime and Hulu and Netflix and not Netflix. Amazon Prime, Hulu YouTube TV, excuse me, and a whole bunch of other spots that have live streaming. I don't have exact numbers on how many people are watching through those platforms, but they get significant reach. And that's a very new try to keep podcasts evergreen, but this is more of a recent development. So hopefully that relationship keeps up. I love their team and they were looking for great business content. So I'll start to see how that distribution really impacts, like really impacts my numbers and I have no idea yet, but that could be, it could be huge for us. And that's like another business lesson. Look for people that have networks and audiences that have already been built that you can tap into in some way because that can really exponentially increase your growth quickly. Definitely. We were talking earlier a little bit about a slow and steady approach to releasing episode versus kind of a speed round. What are your views on that? I think it's very personal. I think it's based on what you can sustain for the long term. So I'm a big fan of a concept where the ideology, if you're going to build anything, you should find a way both very tactically as well as mentally to commit to that thing for up to 10 years when you're first starting. And when you start to commit to something for 10 years, what that does is it allows you to understand how are you going to maintain this thing financially, how much energy, how much bandwidth you need to devote to it so that it can actually maintain for 10 years. It starts to make you think differently. So you ask, should you try and speed around a podcast or should you try and do an episode a week or two episodes a week or an episode every two weeks? I think you have to have a really hard, real discussion with yourself when you're first starting about, if I'm going to do this for 10 years, can I do five episodes a week? Do I have the bandwidth? Is it going to cost me money to hire an editor and how much money can I actually afford to hire an editor? Maybe I have unlimited money. Maybe I don't. Maybe I have to be very, very careful about my resources. How much time do I have? If I can hire an editor, can I even afford five hours of interview plus another couple hours of prep for each one of those interviews every single week? Is that the style of podcasts that I want? Can I afford five hour and a half sessions if I want to do hour and a half podcasts or maybe I'm just doing a short, like John Lee Doombas, it's 30 minutes interview virtual and that's, he does five of those a week. Maybe you want to do in person, obviously a lot more logistics and time required to do an in-person show. Maybe you want to do video. Maybe you just want to do audio. Video creates a whole bunch of headaches that audio doesn't, right? If you just want to do a daily audio show. So, answer is very personal, but you have to understand bandwidth and resource allocation so that you can stick with it for a long period of time. And if you stick with something for a long period of time, you start to make it unreasonable for you not to be good at it and for you not to be able to build an audience or for you not to be able to make some money and increase your revenue doing the thing. So I think that's what you have to look at it and don't try, I don't agree with speed running anything because I think speed running means that you are fooling yourself into thinking that if you just front load all of this energy and all these resources, you're going to have this quicker, positive outcome that's going to make it eventually sustainable. But everything that I've ever built takes more time and more money than I first thought. And I think that's a recipe for burnout and I think it's almost like you're gambling on the business if you try and speedrun anything. I just have never seen an example of somebody doing that successfully, like trying to beat the shot clock on their business. I've never seen that work out in their favor. So just based on my like learned and lived experience in all the entrepreneurs that I know, give yourself twice or three times as much time and twice or three times as much money to the thing as you think that you're going to need. And then you'll still have to work hard. But yeah, you have to give it some time. Now I really like the 10 year window, all right, come in with that approach. It's with mine right now. I'm doing something similar. If you burn out in years three, what was the point? And I think the shared experiences we've had of like running businesses, right? I know my last business year seven, I was done. I was tapped. I went too fast. So year seven is a lot. Year seven, you gave it some time. That's not bad. But still if at year seven, listen, I don't know what your financials were, but at year seven, if you're not making, if you're not taking home like half a million dollars per year, minimum, like just we'll get a job or find a way to pivot at that point. Like year seven is a lot. Year seven, I think that you've given it a concerted effort. And there is something at year seven, if you are not making enough money to pay yourself at least that much, you have some product market fit problem or you have some or some yet or some there's like another version of product market fit where like pain market fit. Like you're not really solving a problem that people care about or there's a messaging problem or something like that, but something needs to be radically shifted because yes, it does take some time to find product market fit. But at the seven year mark, it should be in that growth and scaling mode and poor and fuel on the fire. If you're still trying to figure it out, then there's something missing there. And I think I'm being facetious saying you should get a job if you're entrepreneurial, you never will. But the point is there has to be some radical shift in what you're doing because that's a red flag, I think. No, it's a good point though. You should get a job for not making that kind of money. Guess it's a business is brutal. So like by year six, it was doing 4.2 million and I was taking home like 700K a year. It was a good business. Okay. It also was, I wasn't sustainable. So it got to a point where I'm like, and this thing is going to break me if I continue to push it at this level without getting the right king in place. But if you're taking home 700, why can you not? You can hire a CEO, a decent quality caliber CEO CEO that can build a semiso piece and codify what you know. There's budget in there for that for sure. Exactly. And that's, that was the stage it was at and then shortly thereafter COVID hit in business was stopped. Yeah. I think that also, I think so. There was a company that I joined and I led sales and marketing and as eventually acquired by private equity and right before I had joined the, it was found her own. I think it was doing about eight or nine million. And I think about half of that revenue was founder source deals and revenue, which is wild, but not that uncommon. And the rest of us coming from a small sales team and it was at that point that he realized that he was going to break if he didn't hire a CEO, because he was still running around trying to run. I'm sure there's probably about a 30, 35 person company, plus he was closing about $4 million and deals himself. And that's not, that's also not sustainable. And it was like a very low margin business, it was in hardware. So like telecom hardware. So you, yeah, I think you just have to, that's like a problem that all founders have though. Like they get so into their business and they feel like no one else can do it like them, which is not wrong. No one else is going to have the same passion for what you're building as you. But there is a point where if you are carrying 50% of your companies revenue yourself and you're still running around and you're working like more hours a week and you never see your family. Your quality of life sucks, you've built yourself a super high paying job. And also you're not acquirable, like nobody will buy that business if you're doing 50% of the companies revenue and you're the one also managing all the people. So I think you'll have that wake up call it some everybody will have that wake up call, but that's a very crucial, there's very crucial inflection points in businesses. And I think that when you realize that if they don't move, if the founders are moving themselves, the business is going to die or they will, at the very, that's one of those inflection points, right? Where you have to start to hire out. I didn't know that your business went belly up during COVID, that sucks, that really sucks. It was all right, it was 18, so I had 18 employees in this thing. Yeah. It was very labor intensive and it was time to glad and don't say that we're just saying where we had trucks of returns coming from Amazon Walmart and Target. We had a big warehouse facility and I, a factory workers refurbishing goods. I'm very happy to do a podcast and do digital now and make it scalable and hire good teams and talent and, oh yeah, much better method. That does seem like a headache, however, you still could have, you still could have built that business and you still could have, at some point you can always fire yourself from a business, it's just a matter of how fast, right? Yes. A little bit faster with a self-service software product, of course, you could fire yourself almost immediately outside of, especially if you are a sales and marketing co-founder and you have a technical CTO co-founder and you can find a way to generate positive roas right out of the gate and you can wrap them, take that money and hire a great marketer and they can scale that. Same with this is why e-commerce is so popular as well, but if you have a SaaS product, you could fire yourself almost out of the gate. I know people that are running Chrome extensions that are doing million dollars a year and they're working like two, three hours a week, it's pretty wild what SaaS can do, but that's all about leverage, right? So you have to be smart about what you get into, but now you're in media. So there's a whole bunch of leverage there too, a whole bunch of leverage opportunities because you think about it, the work you do now, I think about this all the time. So the work I do now is not changed fundamentally from when I started the podcast and the work I will do in the future will probably be even less, less work, but revenue increases exponentially. So if I record an hour podcast and it gets seen by 10 people or 50 people or 500,000 people or 5 million people, it is still an hour and a half podcast. Now I've upskilled myself so I can ask better questions and I can have a better conversation and I'll get better guests, but ultimately it's not that different from when I first started. I'm just less nervous now. Let's see only different. One other thing I wanted to get into is your Michelin star story and how different way of something coming to be. The reason why when we were doing a little chat before we started this, you had said something about your business and you said like you were starting a podcast for your business, but we were talking about how the podcast shouldn't just be like a marketing channel for your business, it should stand alone and be so good that it competes with other podcasts. Whether or not it has a business function or a business value to it and the story of Michelin and the Michelin, so Michelin obviously is the tire company and you also know Michelin star, which is like the restaurant rating system and yes, they are related. So, what Michelin, the tire company originally did, you think about a tire company, you think about how old Michelin was, we're talking like decades old, they created tires and when they were creating tires there was not a lot of people who were driving, so they realized that if they want to make more tires and get more business, they need more people on the roads driving. So, they're like how do we get people to drive more and what they decided to do was they decided to make a guide of the best restaurants in Europe because they were a European-based company that people could road trip to and they would rate these restaurants and people would want a road trip outside of their city because they couldn't, like obviously if you're inside your city it's a little bit easier to get around, I'm sure at this point there would probably still some the horse-drawn garages, but if you want to go on long distance trips, car was the way to go, but there had to be incentive, there had to be a reason to go somewhere. So, Michelin was like let's put together a guide of the best restaurants around Europe and we'll incentivize people and almost at the angle of care, look at what you could go be eating at this restaurant all the way over here, guess how you're going to get there, you're probably going to have to get a car and they wanted to do this so that people would drive more, that was really the goal to sell more tires. So, fast forward, that guide has turned into the Michelin Star Guide for restaurants, rating the best restaurants in Europe, the point is they created this ancillary product that was originally meant to help their core business, but it was so good and it stood alone so well that ultimately it became a thing of its own and now the Michelin Star Guide for restaurants is such an important thing for chefs and restaurant owners and also bougie-ass foodies to pay attention to, that they don't even know that it was actually originally created by Michelin as a reason to sell more tires. So, the point is obviously this took decades to evolve into what it is right now, but if you can create something that helps your business like a podcast, make it so good that people listen to the podcast without ever knowing that it was actually created to serve a business function. And I think that when people think about marketing or creating anything, creating a YouTube channel, creating content on social, they think of it as like a means to an end and I think that means to an end, I understand why because they're just trying to achieve a business objective, but I think that if they thought of it as would this Instagram page be interesting even if you didn't buy a product from me or would this podcast be great to listen to even if you didn't buy my product or service, I again think they will have outsized returns and different opportunities to potentially monetize that they never even thought possible before. So, I really think that's a great story to take a lesson from because if you can create this marketing asset, it stands alone, it's going to have massive returns for your business, but I think it's just going to, I think it's going to be like just this huge net positive for you as a business owner or a founder. So, that's the Michelin story, which is one of my favorite stories, but I think that's a great marketing lesson to it. Yeah, I'm just taking care of what you do, right? If you're going to put the time into something, put some energy into it, even if you don't have a facet, how many brands have asked anything they do, they have asked their social, they have asked the corporate podcast they put out, they have asked whatever, it's wild to me and what's wild to me is they have asked all this stuff and the companies that don't have facet stand out, like Duolingo does not have facet or social and they've won marketing awards and everybody knows a stupid green aisle from Duolingo and they have a billion views on TikTok. If you were ever going to learn a language, who else would you go with? I don't even, I haven't even had a chance to learn a second, I know French, but not outside of French in English, I may have learned Spanish and now I'm down in Miami, so it's like a thing that you got to do, but if I'm going to go learn a language, that's where I'm going because they have created this phenomenal tied into culture, marketing powerhouse across all their social, the woman, the mastermind of this whole Duolingo marketing strategy, she's won awards for this marketing strategy now. Point is, if you're going to create anything, create it to a level of excellence that it could compete with another Instagram channel that's just informative or just entertainment or if you're going to create a podcast for your business, create something that is again on par with the biggest podcasts in the world and the brands and the companies, they have the resources to do this, but they don't, and I think they should. If anybody in our audience wanted to listen to your podcast and the amount of energy and effort you put into that, how could they do so? You go to successstorypodcast.com, you can listen to everything there, all the socials that Scott declares on pretty easy to find, but I hope you guys all enjoy it. We do more stuff like this. Yeah, definitely. Everybody make sure to check out Scott's podcast, it's really a great lesson. I listened to quite a few episodes, I went around the time and I'll thank everybody for listening to another episode of failing to success. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, I'm your host Shad Kalecki and we'll see you next time. you