The biggest impact was I got to meet the amazing and wonderful Judy Robinett as my second guest. Judy wrote a book called How to Be a Power Connector and has been doing venture capital funding and helping people for over twenty years. She started sending me people to help with the pitch . . . and they started getting great results. Then she said, “Why don’t we go into business together and start Crack the Funding Code? You’re all about the pitch and the storytelling and the selling and I’m all about strategic introductions and the financials.”
Second, the guests that I’ve interviewed are amazing. Like Guy Spear, who along with another investor, paid over $600,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett. And I interviewed him. I would never have gotten to talk to somebody like Guy if I didn’t have a podcast. Guy said, “Well, how can I help you?” I said, “We’re looking for start-ups who need help with their funding and help with their pitch.” He said, “I started Entrepreneurs’ Organization Israel, let me introduce you.”
Third, I turned ten of my favorite episodes into a book called The Successful Pitch: Conversations on Going from Invisible to Investible because it really is eavesdropping in on those conversations with people that you would never be able to have a conversation with, but you get to eavesdrop in on the book from me interviewing them on the podcast.
Q3: What is the most critical skill for a business owner to master in order to be successful at podcasting?
John: I would say the most critical skills are empathy and listening. One of the investors told me on my podcast that the more empathy you show for your customer, the more you understand that customer and can solve that problem. The more you can put yourself in the shoes of your guests and respond to what they’re saying, make them feel heard, and then summarize what you’re hearing for the audience as the takeaways, that, in my opinion, is what it takes to be really great as a podcast host.
Q4: You’ve had some impressive success with your podcast. So, let’s flip that. What do you consider to be your biggest obstacle or challenge to building momentum?
John: I would say the biggest challenge, after I got over the Three Faces of Fear and was actually starting to do it, was letting go of the need to be perfect. The irony is that I constantly coach my clients to let go of perfectionism and focus on progress, that is, be a “progression-ist” not a “perfectionist.” When I took my own advice, I said, “I’m not going to be great the first few probably. I won’t embarrass myself or make the guests feel uncomfortable, but I’m not probably going to hit it out of the park the first two or three.” Just be gentle with yourself when you start anything new. Nobody starts off perfect.
Q5: What has been your most unexpected surprise during your podcasting journey so far?
John: That there would be a book and I would be on TV. I’ve never dreamed that dream. That was beyond anything I could’ve even imagined. I just wanted to do it to build my network of investors so people would hire me to help them with a pitch and make those introductions. I never dreamed I would meet my business partner, turn it into a book, or that I’d be going to Nashville, Tulsa, and Portland and doing TV here in Los Angeles all because of the podcast.
Q6: Do you have any final advice—anything else you want to share with business owners who may be considering starting their own podcast?
John: Just start—take action and don’t do things that aren’t in your sweet spot. Keep your intention on how can you can serve your listeners.
Vera Fischer, host of System Execution
Vera began her career in residential real estate, working her way up from leasing agent to property manager. She segued to operations manager for the first privately held cognitive rehabilitation clinic in Austin, Texas. In 1993, Vera launched her career at GSD&M, an internationally known advertising agency. After various positions within several Austin-area agencies, Vera went client-side to Forgent Networks. There she managed and implemented a multi-million-dollar marketing budget for several years. In 2004, Vera founded her agency, 97 Degrees West, in Austin.
Q1: Give us an overview of your podcast and the advice shared during a typical episode.
Vera: The podcast focuses on systems and processes for successful companies. Because of what I do in the marketing and branding world, I’ve met with hundreds of business owners. And the recurring theme in the discussions is that getting certain ideas or implementing a new product or implementing a new service is quite difficult from a process perspective, especially if they’re not used to processes, or they get overwhelmed, or they’re not into logistics.
I love processes, and I like systems, so one of my best gifts on my bucket list would be to go see the Amazon warehouse and how they actually get things packaged up. That’s highly interesting to me. Also realizing that there wasn’t a lot out there from a podcast perspective, so I said, “Hey, that’s a great subject matter, and it’s something that can keep going, and it’s very personable because lots of people do it different ways. There’s no one right way to do systems.”
Q2: Why did you start your podcast and what are two or three of the biggest impacts it has had on your business?
Vera: I had been really doing a lot of research the past year before I actually launched it and really tried to understand how to get something like that off the ground. Through that research, I realized that podcasting is a new medium and I felt like there was an opportunity to be on the front end of it.
Also what is fascinating about it is that I have a very specific type of audience so it’s this one tool I can use to have a deep connection with my audience and my guests. In the world of business, for most of us, unless of course you’re Apple, you’re not trying to reach the masses. You should be trying to reach a very specific type of audience that fits your criteria. It also gave me a voice as a business owner and as the brand of an individual. It allowed me to really research and explore what I like and also have an opinion about it.
The impact it’s had on my business has been amazing. My network has exploded. I spend a good amount of my time following up with all of the opportunity. That’s another key is that when you are starting something like this, you’ve got to be ready to follow up on every opportunity, every connection, and every introduction.
There is no way I could have met the people who I’m connecting with now and interviewing had I not started the podcast. Now I’m bringing value to these folks.
I get to be my own media channel because rather than walking up to the folks and saying, “Hey, this is what I do,” I literally can say, “I’d love for you to be on my show.” People get so excited about that. I have no plans to stop. I think it’s just going to get better and better.
Q3: What do you think is the most critical skill for a business owner to master in order to be successful at podcasting?
Vera: You have to want to educate—especially from a business perspective. You’re there to teach your listeners something: a skill, how to approach life, how to approach business, how to do something within their business, and if that doesn’t come as an innate talent to you, or desire, it won’t be fun. It’s supposed to be fun. You should be energized by it.
Q4: You’ve had some impressive success with your podcast. So, let’s flip that. What do you consider to be your biggest obstacle or challenge to building momentum?
Vera: It’s hard to get guests at the beginning, and you should launch with at least ten podcasts in your queue. When you don’t have a website or your podcast is brand new . . . you really have to find people willing to be interviewed without really knowing or seeing a lot of information about your podcast. But don’t give up. Just keep going. In the beginning I literally, if there was a prominent business person I connected with, I wanted to interview them regardless of whether or not they were the right fit from an industry perspective. Just to help build some initial credibility.
Once I get them to sign up through my online scheduling link, and by the time that I get on Skype with them, they had already been communicat
ed with several different times via email and text. We have a very professional Guest Advocacy System. By the time I get on Skype with them, they already know that it is a credible situation. I’ve never had anyone say, “I just don’t think this is the right thing for me. I don’t want to do the interview.”
I solved this initial challenge in an interesting way. In my business, my role is sales, marketing, and finance. I spend a good part of my day understanding digital and really participating in that. I think that has made a huge difference. Through that, because I monitor our company’s Twitter and my personal Twitter accounts, I started inviting people via Twitter, and shockingly they said yes. I couldn’t believe it at first. Now it’s even easier because I have a proven concept.
Q5: I know you track where you invest your time as well as your productivity—so how many hours do you typically invest each week toward your podcast? Where are you spending the time? What are your vital priorities as it relates to your show?
Vera: My guests are my vital priority. I probably spend two hours a week recruiting guests. It’s getting easier because people know about my show. Whoever gets interviewed, I have a really great referral as well. Guests say to me, “Oh, I have a great person who would want to be on your show,” and they’ll send them to me. That part is getting easier, and I’m not spending as much time. As far as the interviews are concerned, they are usually anywhere from thirty minutes to sixty minutes and it depends on how many I have scheduled for the week, so it could be one hour or five hours out of my week.
The key is that I am not involved in the execution of all of this stuff. My role is to connect, have the interview, focus on that, and then my team takes care of everything else. I can’t imagine if I had to do it on my own and do all of the editing, and the promoting, and everything like that. That would probably take up twenty hours a week. In my opinion, it’s critical that you have a team that’s managing and executing on all of that, where you’re just focused on the good stuff—the interviewing and the guests.
Q6: What has been your most unexpected surprise during your podcasting journey so far?
Vera: That all of these incredibly intelligent people who have so many accolades and all of the cred, if you will, that goes with those people, they’re just regular people. They’re funny, and they deal with crazy schedules just like everybody else, and they’ve got kids, and they’ve got life things that are going on. They say to me, “What can I do for you? How can I help you?” Wow.
Q7: Do you have any final advice—anything else you want to share with business owners who may be considering starting their own podcast?
Vera: Podcasting is like taking a left turn. If you are taking a left turn and you see a car coming, you’ve got to commit. You can’t stop in the middle of the road—you must follow through. Podcasting is definitely a commitment. It’s not a toe dip. You’re either in or you’re out. Once you’re ready to go—commit.
Drew McLellan, host of Build a Better Agency
Drew is the top dog at Agency Management Institute (AMI). He has also owned and operated his own agency over the past twenty years. All through the year, he straddles the fence of working in his own agency and working with 250+ small to midsize agencies in a variety of ways. He works with agency owners in peer network groups, he teaches workshops for owners and their teams, and he does consulting. His Build a Better Agencypodcast reached number one in iTunes’ New and Noteworthy shortly after launch.
Q1: Give us an overview of your podcast and the advice shared during a typical episode.
Drew: My podcast is an offshoot of my business, Agency Management Institute, and so as one might infer from the word agency being in both of those names, my audience is narrow. I serve agency owners and agency leaders in advertising, marketing, PR, media—those kinds of agencies that are what I call small to midsized. They might have one employee up to about three hundred employees. They are privately owned so the owners are still invested in the business, not only financially but it’s where they spend their days.
My guests then are equally focused. When I sort of screen for who would make a good guest the question I ask myself is, “What could they teach an agency owner?” For me that gets easy because not only do I have that business, but I still own my own agency. I’m able to look at it from the lens of, “Can I learn something from these people in terms of running my agency?” That means my audience can as well. My guests have ranged. They’re really a wide array of people in terms of their skill set, so everyone from CPAs who can talk about how to build your agency’s value before you sell it, to an intellectual property attorney who talked about protecting trademarks, to people who own an agency, who’ve built an agency from scratch, or who’ve left a big agency to go out on their own.
So I really try to come at it in terms of who can help agencies be better, be more profitable, build a better entity, have better employee relationships. Anybody who can talk about any of those topics is game for me as a guest.
Q2: Why did you start your podcast and what are two or three of the biggest impacts it has had on your business?
Drew: I think like most things in business there are intended consequences and then there are surprises, so my intended consequence was to broaden AMI’s digital foot-print—to create a platform that was more interactive and allowed me to share with my audience expertise beyond my own expertise. I’ve owned my own agency for twenty-one years, and I’ve been doing this AMI gig for almost a decade, so it’s not that I don’t have a lot of knowledge around running a better agency, but there are certain things that guest Sharon Toerek knows because of her expertise as an IP attorney that I’m never going to be able to speak to with the same influence and authority she can.
I wanted to add even more value than I’m capable of doing on my own; hence, I need super-smart guests who have expertise outside of my own small sphere of knowledge. That’s some of the unintended consequences, so I knew that I’d be exposed to more people. I knew that that would over time trickle into workshop registrations and other things, consulting gigs, all that sort of thing. A couple of things came out of it that I really hadn’t expected.
Number one, the trickle of opportunity from podcast guests to workshop attendee has been greater and faster than I thought it would. So that’s awesome.
It’s not just workshops, it’s consulting gigs, and AMI runs peer networks where agency owners come together and become like a Vistage group, but everybody is an agency owner. There have been more members joining. All of the things that AMI offers have benefited from the podcast, but some of the unintended or what I didn’t really think about, or maybe went out of my primary goals are, I now have deeper connections with all of those guests, and that serves my audience in a couple ways. One, I have people I can connect agency owners to when they need a specific thing. I’m a much better referral source now to be able to connect them to these experts.
Number two, at a lot of the workshops and AMI peer networks and some of the other things we do, I need great speakers, so the podcast has been a way for me to audition, if you will, the speakers to see if they would be good as a guest.
Number three, it’s opened up some really interesting partnerships between me and some guests. We’ve been able to collaborate on things together. Projects that serve a lot of them also serve the same audience. It’s deepened my friendship with those folks, and it’s got me a lot more invites into industry events, so that’s been great.
There’s not been a downside—there’s been much more benefit than I ever expected.
I think the model you teach, which is the Trojan horse of sales, where you’re inviting as guests to your show people you would like to do business with, I think that’s brilliant. It’s just not what I decided to do. As you know, I’m talking to other folks about it all the time and suggesting that they think about doing that and that they talk to you. Because I do think it’s spot on.
I guess I would put it this way—I’m accidentally getting more business out
of my podcast guests because of how and who they are. I think when you have great intention about who you invite on your show you can do it at an exponentially faster and better rate, but that wasn’t my goal so it’s not the way I built my podcast, but I certainly think it’s a smart way to build a podcast.
Q3: What is the most critical skill for a business owner to master in order to be successful at podcasting?
Drew: I think it’s a combination of skills, but I think the most important skill is that the host needs to be able to check their ego at the door. My job is to augment and put the spotlight on my guest and their expertise. I do that by listening really hard to what they say and running it through my filter of, “What else would an agency owner want to know about that?” I’m not talking over them. I’m not trying to jump in and show how much I know about it, but I am listening super hard. I am asking follow-up questions and trying to stay out of the guest’s way so they have as much airtime as possible to share expertise.
I’m always listening like, “What should I be asking next? What did somebody want to hear more about that or how would they want to drill deeper into this?” I’m trying to ask those questions because I don’t want somebody going, “I can’t believe he didn’t ask X!”
Q4: You’ve had some impressive success, like reaching number one in iTunes’ New and Noteworthy during your launch. But, what do you consider to be your biggest obstacle or challenge to building momentum?
Drew: I’m sure I have the same doubts that everybody had. “What if I suck? What if nobody listens? What if no one wants to be a guest?” At first there was the, “How much work is it going to take?” For me it was really, I don’t want to say a confidence issue, but it’s a new venture, “What if I’m not good at it?” You’re in essence doing it live, so what if I say something silly? How do I recover from that?
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