I jam-pack my invite email with everything. I get so many people who don’t respond to the email—they just immediately book with me.
Lori Jones, host of Integrate & Ignite
President and CEO of Avocet Communications, Lori brings top retail, consumer product, business-to-business, and nonprofit organization knowledge and experience in all aspects of integrated marketing to clients. Her experience with Fortune 500 brands and entrepreneurial start-ups enables her to contribute a keen understanding of the intricacies of today’s businesses. Lori is also the host of the brilliant podcast Integrate and Ignite.
Q1: Give us an overview of your podcast and the advice shared during a typical episode.
Lori: I explore the nature of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Every episode is crafted to make people think, and spark some of those aha moments, or just to illustrate how important a truly integrated business and marketing strategy is, and really provide a solid blueprint for people to lead to success and longevity. At the end of the day, our guests are a mix of start-up entrepreneurs, and Fortune 500 CEOs from different industries. If our listeners seek out the advice, inspiration, or gain a good laugh, or just one of those kicks in the pants that they might need, then I feel that we’re pushing out good content.
We explore several different topics through each interview. We talk about philosophy, and leadership, and what qualities it takes to succeed in today’s fast-changing business climate. We then get into approach. What is their approach to leadership? How do they integrate their internal departments, and, more important, which is the premise behind the podcast, what are they doing from an integrative marketing standpoint? What has worked? What hasn’t? What can they share with our listeners? We then move into the third segment of the interview, which deals with obstacles. We’ve all had a lot of obstacles in our business lives, in our personal lives—and challenging times that could have devastated us. We glean insight from these CEOs and business leaders on what they did to overcome those obstacles. We end the podcast with success and defining what success means to them as an individual, as an organization, and talk through some of the processes that they deploy on a day-to-day basis for big wins.
I love it. I get so excited when I get to record a podcast, talk with a CEO, or a business leader, or a start-up entrepreneur about what is in their head. I’m constantly learning, which is important to the mindset I have with all of our team members as well.
Q2: What does a “personal brand” mean to you and how can a business owner use that to create differentiation?
Lori: Personal branding is about making a full-time commitment to the journey of defining yourself, as a leader, and how it shapes the manner in which you serve others. It should represent your value, and consistently deliver to those whom you serve, or those whom you report to, or those, ultimately, whom you want to be able to impact positively. The most important thing about personal branding is that it’s not about self-promotion.
People don’t care about all the accolades, and all the awards, or anything like that. You don’t showcase yourself. You showcase your passion. Managing your personal brand requires that you be a great role model, that you be a mentor, that you’ve got a voice, that people can learn, grow, and depend on.
Q3: Why did you start your podcast and what are two or three of the biggest impacts it has had on your business?
Lori: I’m very inquisitive, and I love to learn. I always want to know more. From a business standpoint there have been several benefits from my podcast. Here are a few: It’s all about building top of mind awareness, or “TOMA,” surrounding integrative marketing approaches for small and big businesses. My podcast has enhanced our agency’s position as a leader in our space. You cannot dream up the quality of content we are now producing from our episodes. The content was a major reason I knew going into this that the podcast would benefit our business.
The other point I want to make is we’re able to open up doors that probably would not have been opened without the podcast. In our industry, there are Fortune 500 companies that get contacted consistently—and constantly—from marketing firms like mine. This has allowed me an entrée that is unique and different, it establishes credibility out of the shoot, and it builds context for the prospect. All of that would be very difficult to do otherwise.
Q4: What is the most critical skill for a business owner to master in order to be successful at podcasting?
Lori: I have a script going into every podcast, but I have to be able to think on my feet and ask questions throughout the interview that are poignant and relevant based on a response that has been given by my guest. I listened to many, many podcasts, and this is something that you do very well—you pivot.
I’ve got my script going into each interview, and I plan to ask similar questions in each episode, but 50 percent of the content generated is typically based on questions that have been asked while I am pivoting in response to what a guest shared.
Q5: 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?
Lori: I don’t believe most people are fully aware of the strength of podcasting. They might even be a little afraid of it. They might even ask themselves, “What is a podcast?” Despite the explanation that I provide guests up front, some prospective guests are afraid about the amount of prep time they might need. So our podcast has become a good litmus test. If people we talk to, if there’s a great brand out there that ultimately we want to become a part of, and they don’t understand what a podcast is, that’s a good litmus test for us to know. Maybe they’re not quite up to this sort of solution. That has been a big epiphany since we started the podcast.
Also, guests are very busy. Case in point, we found out two and a half weeks ago that one of our clients was going to appear on ABC’s Shark Tank. We had two weeks to finalize the plans and get ready for the show. I ended up having to cancel a couple of podcasts that week, which I felt horrible about, because we were stretched in getting ready for a viewing party with 250 people, all of the media relations, and press that were coming through my office that week. I felt horrible for having to cancel, which was one of my mantras going into this is—that I would never do that. But the point is also this: Your guests will end up rescheduling, and canceling, some of them two and three times, because of the same reasons. They get so busy that they end up having to reschedule things. Don’t take it personally. It’s going to happen and just stay on top of it.
So back to our client and Shark Tank for just a minute . . .
It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever been through in my business career. I mean, how often does that happen? That one of your clients ends up on Shark Tank! So we used our podcast to help introduce it.
We did an encore interview with our client. We did a pre-show interview. We knew that the Shark Tank episode was going to air on October 7th—so the week before ABC aired the episode we aired our podcast based on four simple questions ABC would allow us to ask and talk about.
That helped to raise awareness about how our client was going to have their appearance on the 7th. The press leading up to it won interview after interview. It was a total blast. After the show aired, the following morning, we did another interview, post-Tank, and talked through what we knew, what we could talk through at that time, regarding the fact that they had won, and that they had been funded. I asked what it was like being in front of the audience that night. What are you going to do going forward? All these great nuggets of content shared by our client.
We recorded that podcast the Saturday after the show, and we released it Monday morning. We also released a newsletter a week later. We wrote a story about what you need to consider when you are going on a show like Shark Tank. What you need to be aware of. What you can say. What you can’t say. It was just an incredibly exciting opportunity for my agency. We had a blast, but what I’m also going to let you know is, off of this
podcast, we got a call from another company that is going to be airing on Shark Tank, and we’re going to be promoting their show as well, which all happened because of the podcast. Now, it’s not just one—we’re on number two!
And lastly, on the night of the event, we created an experience. Our entire marketing team was there, and we were live-streaming Google Analytics and social media data to the audience. They could see these huge spikes as the show was airing from coast to coast. We delivered an integrated plan, but we also created experiential components the night of the event.
Q6: 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?
Lori: I personally invest around ten hours a week with interviews, reviewing content, and prospecting additional guests I’d like to have on the show. My vital priorities include getting the big brands, and the big leaders on the show, which can really take months to accomplish. Our team invests about fifteen hours a week creating the content, newsletter, Show Notes, and the actual podcast episodes from a production standpoint. All in, it’s about twenty-five hours a week for our entire team.
Q7: Do you have any final advice—anything else you want to share with business owners who may be considering starting their own podcast?
Lori: We all, for the most part, have these incredible personable brands out there, but they’re on paper. They’re words. They’re visual. They might have a voice, but there’s nothing better than the actual voice. Your actual voice delivering content! To me, a person’s voice adds that personal connection to their brand, and to their content—and that is very valuable to the personal brand.
Kelly Hatfield, host of Absolute Advantage
Kelly is a cofounder of Enginuity Advantage. She has been in the recruiting and HR field for twenty years and loves serving others. Kelly and her business partner have built three successful companies with the purpose of helping others succeed and delivering remarkable results. Kelly and her team strategically align themselves as the “Partner of Choice” with clients and strive to be the first place to call when clients are looking for extraordinary service, quality, and reliability. Kelly is also the host of the outstanding podcast Absolute Advantage.
Q1: Give us an overview of your podcast and the advice shared during a typical episode.
Kelly: The Absolute Advantage podcast is for entrepreneurs, leaders, achievers, and emerging leaders. Our goal of it is to shorten our audience’s path to success. We’re gathering insights and learning from the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, leaders, and achievers at the top of their game. One of the reasons I started the podcast was because I realized that as entrepreneurs or leaders, it can be a lonely place or you’re questioning yourself a lot: “Gosh, am I doing the right thing?”
I think hearing from other leaders and entrepreneurs—their stories, their concepts, their insights—with the goal being if every person can take away one pearl of wisdom each episode that they can apply and improve their business, improve their leadership skills, then it was a win. We talk a lot about leadership, cultivating people, building teams, personal development. These topics are all relevant to who our audience is.
But there is something else. In our business, we own a couple of recruiting firms, so we’ve gained a unique perspective from being entrepreneurs, building our teams, scaling, and doing those things. And we also meet with thousands of companies who are our clients and we hear their pain and we hear what they’re going through or we may be having conversations and can identify some of their pain before they even realize what it is.
That perspective and background uncovered some common themes, which are leadership, cultivating people, building teams, and building culture. A lot of our discussions—because, again, our business as recruiting is about attracting talent and retaining talent—so our podcast serves two things, which is as an entrepreneur and feeling like that circle shrinks a little bit the more successful you get, so these discussions have become a bit of a system of support and encouragement.
And then there was the aspect of, “Gosh, all of these people, including ourselves, are going through a similar kind of pain, or the same kind of situations or issues keep arising.” I wanted to help solve for that. Through our podcast, we are building a community around that.
Q2: Why did you start your podcast and what are two or three of the biggest impacts it has had on your business?
Kelly: I have spent over twenty years in the recruiting business and really was looking for something and seeking something that would allow me to make more of an impact on people than I already was—to be able to reach more people and have a greater impact.
The second thing was to build a community where people weren’t feeling like they were alone, where we were covering a lot of topics that many people were going through.
Then I thought, “Okay, well, how can we do this? How can I accomplish this and bring more value to our clients as well?” That’s really where the whole idea of doing the podcast spawned with the goal of creating more impact and wanting to bring more value to our clients.
The feedback I’m getting in terms of the topics, people reaching back out and saying, “Hey, I just listened today to your duo cast about hiring slow and firing fast. Some of that information that you shared, can we talk a little bit more about it?” They’re really starting to look to us even more so than they ever did. Some are clients we have worked with for a long time while others are clients who are fairly new where they’re looking to us as the experts in our field. The podcast is positioning us as subject matter experts.
Q3: What is the most critical skill for a business owner to master in order to be successful at podcasting?
Kelly: I would have to say active listening, being engaged and present in the conversation with your guest, hearing what they say, reflecting it back to them and/or highlighting some key points they shared and making sure you have clarity about what it is they’re saying for your audience and to help your guest shine.
Having been a guest on podcasts myself, there have been times where I felt like, “Okay, I’m in the right place. This host is hearing what I have to say. They’re trying to get the best out of me for the audience. What I’m saying matters. They’re getting it.” Helping a guest feel comfortable is a way to go a little bit deeper with the conversation; maybe your guest will then share another example, another kind of pearl, or another layer of information. The great podcast hosts are the ones who really pull the best out of their guests, which means they engage at another level.
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?
Kelly: That darn impostor syndrome! For me, it was overcoming something in myself that was saying, “Okay, what is it that you’ve got to bring to the table?” I’m interviewing these amazing people and at the same time thinking, “Okay, why are they going to want to talk to me?”
On the flip side, too, one of the things that I didn’t realize is that 90 percent of the people who are guests on the show are thinking the very same thing. I’ve reached out to some amazing business owners in my network; it’s been a challenge getting them to be a guest because they’re having the very same thoughts, like, “Oh, yeah. Well, I’ve built this great business but I’m not sure what I am going to have to bring to the conversation.” And I have said right back to them, “Well, that’s exactly why I want you to be my guest, because you’ve built this amazing business and started out of your garage, and it’s this multi-million-dollar business now with hundreds of employees.”
Checking ego at the door is huge. I have a business coach and we were having a conversation about the show. It was like getting a glass of cold water thrown in my face when he said, “When did this become about you?” I said, “You know what? You’re right,”
and he said, “Where’s the Kelly who is always about bringing value to people and about this being about the audience and key points that need to be made with the audience and in giving of yourself and giving to the audience? When did this become about you and how you feel?”
It’s all about the audience and the guests. This isn’t about me in any way.
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?
Kelly: Five to six hours a week for our two episodes. My vital priorities are prepping for the shows and the recording time. Because we’re partnering with a team like Predictive ROI, once I’m done recording the interview, all I’m doing then is uploading that recording into an Airing Schedule, and then my production team takes it from there. I don’t have to do all of the other things associated with the podcast.
That was one of the things that was really important to me, too, as, first of all, I didn’t have the time to learn about everything there is to learn about podcasting. There are professionals out there who can do all of these, and I would have paid double, triple, quadruple the amount had I tried to do it on my own, screwed it up, and then had somebody come and fix it for me. It’s a fantastic production, and I’ve got a great team who supports me.
Q6: What has been your most unexpected surprise during your podcasting journey so far?
Kelly: We’ve had some amazing guests on the show who are masters at building an awesome culture within a company. Applying some of those lessons and seeing the results internally with our team as a result of implementing the thoughts and ideas from our guests has been awesome.
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