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Guest Podcast: Business Podcast Secrets (Failing To Success) · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I chose to triple down on my personal brand because I wanted me and who I was to outlive
• 0:15
  the business.
• 0:16
  Eventually, value turns into an impressions and eyeballs and trust.
• 0:20
  We'll turn into money.
• 0:22
  Focus on building an audience and when you build an audience, you monetize it.
• 0:26
  The podcast for me was not meant to make money.
• 0:28
  I think it was meant to build out a community today on the show.
• 0:32
  I'm happy to have stopped clearing.
• 0:33
  He's the founder of the success story podcast.
• 0:36
  They are a top 10 business podcasts, much larger than mine.
• 0:40
  Stop.
• 0:40
  Happy having you on today.
• 0:42
  I'm very grateful to come on.
• 0:43
  Thank you.
• 0:44
  Thank you.
• 0:45
  No, and I've just been doing it for longer.
• 0:46
  That's it.
• 0:47
  Yours is going to get there.
• 0:48
  So don't worry.
• 0:49
  The style.
• 0:50
  What is the model behind your podcast?
• 0:51
  I know we spoke about like how I monetize.
• 0:53
  I want to hear how you do it and how it works.
• 0:56
  So I think that it's important to understand my mindset going into the podcast.
• 1:01
  So when I started a podcast, I was still building a business and I knew that business was going
• 1:05
  to be acquired at some point.
• 1:07
  So I chose to triple down on my personal brand because I wanted me and who I was to
• 1:13
  outlive the business because I saw a lot of people unless you have a seriously significant
• 1:19
  acquisition event or exit event, meaning like 50 million, 100 million plus where or
• 1:25
  you're just in some super innovative niche.
• 1:28
  I think that the second you sell a company, you're forgotten and you have to start from scratch.
• 1:32
  So I was looking at the Gary visa, the world that built massive audiences and they get
• 1:37
  they were able to just launch products again, again, against this audience that trusted
• 1:41
  them explicitly.
• 1:42
  And that's really what I wanted to build.
• 1:44
  When I first started, I did not start a podcast to achieve a business objective.
• 1:48
  I started a podcast to build a community or build a tribe or whatever you want to call
• 1:52
  it just to get as many eyeballs just to know who I am as possible.
• 1:57
  And I knew that if I did that for a long enough period of time, there would be some financial
• 2:03
  benefit to doing that.
• 2:05
  And that's really the mindset that I had going in started off as a sales and marketing
• 2:08
  focused podcast because that was really where my career was at the time and then it evolved
• 2:13
  to it's interesting how a podcast evolves with you because it mirrors the conversations
• 2:19
  and the interest that you have as a host.
• 2:21
  So as I went through my career journey and my life journey and the company was acquired
• 2:26
  and I wanted to keep the podcast going obviously because I was a purpose, I started to dive
• 2:30
  into more diverse topics.
• 2:32
  So it wasn't just sales and marketing, it was just business, entrepreneurship, it could
• 2:36
  be personal, professional development, upskilling, all these different things that I found interesting
• 2:40
  that I realized that I had to learn and incorporate into my life to be successful in anything
• 2:45
  that I did and what and these are all topics that and ideas that helped me become successful
• 2:50
  in business but also in relationships and life and everything.
• 2:53
  So yeah, there was no goal to productize the podcast, it was to build the largest audience
• 2:59
  possible that loved my content, learned from my content, give as much value as possible
• 3:04
  and then eventually value turns into an impressions and eyeballs and trust will turn into money
• 3:11
  if you keep it up for long enough, it's not the quickest way to monetize, but I think
• 3:15
  it's one of the most fulfilling ways and it's one of the ways that could have outsized
• 3:19
  exponential returns in the long run if you do it for long enough because to productize
• 3:24
  right away what you're doing is there's no issue with that because I think that's smart
• 3:29
  for some people that want to use a podcast for a very specific business objective but it
• 3:33
  ends up being a little bit more transactional up front and you're not going to build a cast
• 3:39
  as wide a net because it doesn't serve you to cast as wide a net and to reach all these
• 3:42
  other people and all of the adjacent categories or have all these incillery discussions that
• 3:46
  don't benefit targeting somebody who's going to buy your product or service for your business.
• 3:51
  So again, focus on building an audience and when you build an audience you monetize it
• 3:56
  and if you're not selling a product, course, widget, SaaS, CPG, what do you have nothing
• 4:02
  to sell that you sell impressions so it was just advertiser revenue coming in and that's
• 4:06
  really been how the podcast had been self-sustaining for the past six years really focused on landing
• 4:14
  major advertisers.
• 4:15
  I've worked with incredible brands, I've worked with HubSpot for almost three years now,
• 4:20
  worked with NetSweets, worked with Indeed, worked with LinkedIn as well, these are some
• 4:26
  of the bigger ones.
• 4:27
  There's ones like Athletic Greens, I'm a big fan of their product, work with them, I know
• 4:31
  a whole bunch of other smaller brands that are more niche but it was really just attracting
• 4:35
  great advertisers that resonated with me personally and also resonated with the audience and
• 4:40
  then use a trust and report that a goat by audience to bring great products in front
• 4:44
  of them.
• 4:45
  And again, that's one way to monetize, it's definitely not the quickest way to make a ton
• 4:50
  of money.
• 4:51
  But the podcast for me was not meant to make money, it was meant to, I think it was meant
• 4:56
  to build out a community that later on I could use to launch again, products for services
• 5:01
  like I said.
• 5:02
  So it's achieving that objective and the money that it makes really just gets rolled
• 5:06
  back into production and growth of the show, I don't really need to take the money out
• 5:10
  of the show.
• 5:11
  And I think that obviously that's a very, very good position and privilege position that
• 5:15
  I'm in.
• 5:16
  But that was part of the strategy and that's also why I didn't just quit a job to start
• 5:22
  a podcast which is a whole other conversation about good entrepreneurship and best practices
• 5:26
  for entrepreneurship because I found ways to sane myself so that doing the thing that
• 5:30
  I love could eventually turn into a full-time thing, but it didn't matter if it took a
• 5:36
  little while to get there, which I just think is a healthy way to think about entrepreneurship
• 5:39
  in general.
• 5:40
  So yeah, that's how I looked at monetizing it and building it out.
• 5:45
  How far into it before larger advertisers started becoming a piece of the sponsor here?
• 5:50
  About three years, about two and a half, three years, about two and a half, like when
• 5:55
  I was about, I'm just trying to think, about 100,000 downloads a year is when the bigger
• 6:01
  advertisers started to approach.
• 6:03
  There was like one off before, but we're talking like a couple hundred bucks and they weren't
• 6:08
  renewing or they just weren't significant or they weren't long-term, like some of the
• 6:13
  brands that I just mentioned, they're like year-long engagements or multi-year-long
• 6:16
  engagements.
• 6:17
  And that was about 100,000 downloads about three years there.
• 6:20
  What are you at today?
• 6:21
  Like, how much traction and download are you getting on the podcast?
• 6:24
  I get between 700,000 to a million downloads a month across YouTube and audio.
• 6:32
  It ranges.
• 6:33
  Summer's a little bit slower right now.
• 6:34
  We're sitting on the lower end of that number, but we've been higher before in podcast
• 6:39
  land.
• 6:40
  You'll see peaks and valleys and summer is usually the quietest.
• 6:43
  For me, I'm hoping that we can like surpass that going into September, October, November.
• 6:48
  Also very fortunate that the podcast is actually syndicated now through cheddar.
• 6:54
  So I'm not counting and what cheddar is a major financial news media company.
• 6:59
  And they stream on Amazon Prime and Hulu and Netflix and not Netflix.
• 7:03
  Amazon Prime, Hulu YouTube TV, excuse me, and a whole bunch of other spots that have
• 7:07
  live streaming.
• 7:08
  I don't have exact numbers on how many people are watching through those platforms, but
• 7:13
  they get significant reach.
• 7:14
  And that's a very new try to keep podcasts evergreen, but this is more of a recent development.
• 7:18
  So hopefully that relationship keeps up.
• 7:20
  I love their team and they were looking for great business content.
• 7:24
  So I'll start to see how that distribution really impacts, like really impacts my numbers
• 7:29
  and I have no idea yet, but that could be, it could be huge for us.
• 7:32
  And that's like another business lesson.
• 7:34
  Look for people that have networks and audiences that have already been built that you can tap
• 7:39
  into in some way because that can really exponentially increase your growth quickly.
• 7:44
  Definitely.
• 7:45
  We were talking earlier a little bit about a slow and steady approach to releasing episode
• 7:48
  versus kind of a speed round.
• 7:50
  What are your views on that?
• 7:52
  I think it's very personal.
• 7:54
  I think it's based on what you can sustain for the long term.
• 7:57
  So I'm a big fan of a concept where the ideology, if you're going to build anything, you
• 8:02
  should find a way both very tactically as well as mentally to commit to that thing for
• 8:08
  up to 10 years when you're first starting.
• 8:12
  And when you start to commit to something for 10 years, what that does is it allows you
• 8:18
  to understand how are you going to maintain this thing financially, how much energy,
• 8:23
  how much bandwidth you need to devote to it so that it can actually maintain for 10 years.
• 8:26
  It starts to make you think differently.
• 8:28
  So you ask, should you try and speed around a podcast or should you try and do an episode
• 8:32
  a week or two episodes a week or an episode every two weeks?
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  I think you have to have a really hard, real discussion with yourself when you're first
• 8:40
  starting about, if I'm going to do this for 10 years, can I do five episodes a week?
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  Do I have the bandwidth?
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  Is it going to cost me money to hire an editor and how much money can I actually afford
• 8:51
  to hire an editor?
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  Maybe I have unlimited money.
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  Maybe I don't.
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  Maybe I have to be very, very careful about my resources.
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  How much time do I have?
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  If I can hire an editor, can I even afford five hours of interview plus another couple
• 9:05
  hours of prep for each one of those interviews every single week?
• 9:08
  Is that the style of podcasts that I want?
• 9:10
  Can I afford five hour and a half sessions if I want to do hour and a half podcasts or
• 9:13
  maybe I'm just doing a short, like John Lee Doombas, it's 30 minutes interview virtual
• 9:19
  and that's, he does five of those a week.
• 9:21
  Maybe you want to do in person, obviously a lot more logistics and time required to do
• 9:26
  an in-person show.
• 9:28
  Maybe you want to do video.
• 9:29
  Maybe you just want to do audio.
• 9:30
  Video creates a whole bunch of headaches that audio doesn't, right?
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  If you just want to do a daily audio show.
• 9:34
  So, answer is very personal, but you have to understand bandwidth and resource allocation
• 9:41
  so that you can stick with it for a long period of time.
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  And if you stick with something for a long period of time, you start to make it unreasonable
• 9:47
  for you not to be good at it and for you not to be able to build an audience or for you
• 9:52
  not to be able to make some money and increase your revenue doing the thing.
• 9:56
  So I think that's what you have to look at it and don't try, I don't agree with speed
• 10:00
  running anything because I think speed running means that you are fooling yourself into thinking
• 10:06
  that if you just front load all of this energy and all these resources, you're going
• 10:12
  to have this quicker, positive outcome that's going to make it eventually sustainable.
• 10:17
  But everything that I've ever built takes more time and more money than I first thought.
• 10:22
  And I think that's a recipe for burnout and I think it's almost like you're gambling
• 10:26
  on the business if you try and speedrun anything.
• 10:29
  I just have never seen an example of somebody doing that successfully, like trying to beat
• 10:36
  the shot clock on their business.
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  I've never seen that work out in their favor.
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  So just based on my like learned and lived experience in all the entrepreneurs that I
• 10:44
  know, give yourself twice or three times as much time and twice or three times as much
• 10:50
  money to the thing as you think that you're going to need.
• 10:53
  And then you'll still have to work hard.
• 10:55
  But yeah, you have to give it some time.
• 10:59
  Now I really like the 10 year window, all right, come in with that approach.
• 11:03
  It's with mine right now.
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  I'm doing something similar.
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  If you burn out in years three, what was the point?
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  And I think the shared experiences we've had of like running businesses, right?
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  I know my last business year seven, I was done.
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  I was tapped.
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  I went too fast.
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  So year seven is a lot.
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  Year seven, you gave it some time.
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  That's not bad.
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  But still if at year seven, listen, I don't know what your financials were, but at year
• 11:27
  seven, if you're not making, if you're not taking home like half a million dollars
• 11:32
  per year, minimum, like just we'll get a job or find a way to pivot at that point.
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  Like year seven is a lot.
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  Year seven, I think that you've given it a concerted effort.
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  And there is something at year seven, if you are not making enough money to pay yourself
• 11:46
  at least that much, you have some product market fit problem or you have some or some yet
• 11:52
  or some there's like another version of product market fit where like pain market fit.
• 11:57
  Like you're not really solving a problem that people care about or there's a messaging
• 12:01
  problem or something like that, but something needs to be radically shifted because yes,
• 12:05
  it does take some time to find product market fit.
• 12:08
  But at the seven year mark, it should be in that growth and scaling mode and poor
• 12:13
  and fuel on the fire.
• 12:15
  If you're still trying to figure it out, then there's something missing there.
• 12:17
  And I think I'm being facetious saying you should get a job if you're entrepreneurial,
• 12:21
  you never will.
• 12:22
  But the point is there has to be some radical shift in what you're doing because that's
• 12:25
  a red flag, I think.
• 12:26
  No, it's a good point though.
• 12:28
  You should get a job for not making that kind of money.
• 12:30
  Guess it's a business is brutal.
• 12:32
  So like by year six, it was doing 4.2 million and I was taking home like 700K a year.
• 12:36
  It was a good business.
• 12:37
  Okay.
• 12:38
  It also was, I wasn't sustainable.
• 12:42
  So it got to a point where I'm like, and this thing is going to break me if I continue
• 12:45
  to push it at this level without getting the right king in place.
• 12:49
  But if you're taking home 700, why can you not?
• 12:51
  You can hire a CEO, a decent quality caliber CEO CEO that can build a semiso piece and
• 12:58
  codify what you know.
• 12:59
  There's budget in there for that for sure.
• 13:01
  Exactly.
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  And that's, that was the stage it was at and then shortly thereafter COVID hit in business
• 13:07
  was stopped.
• 13:08
  Yeah.
• 13:09
  I think that also, I think so.
• 13:10
  There was a company that I joined and I led sales and marketing and as eventually acquired
• 13:14
  by private equity and right before I had joined the, it was found her own.
• 13:18
  I think it was doing about eight or nine million.
• 13:22
  And I think about half of that revenue was founder source deals and revenue, which is
• 13:26
  wild, but not that uncommon.
• 13:28
  And the rest of us coming from a small sales team and it was at that point that he realized
• 13:34
  that he was going to break if he didn't hire a CEO, because he was still running around
• 13:37
  trying to run.
• 13:38
  I'm sure there's probably about a 30, 35 person company, plus he was closing about $4 million
• 13:43
  and deals himself.
• 13:45
  And that's not, that's also not sustainable.
• 13:47
  And it was like a very low margin business, it was in hardware.
• 13:51
  So like telecom hardware.
• 13:52
  So you, yeah, I think you just have to, that's like a problem that all founders have though.
• 13:57
  Like they get so into their business and they feel like no one else can do it like them,
• 14:02
  which is not wrong.
• 14:03
  No one else is going to have the same passion for what you're building as you.
• 14:07
  But there is a point where if you are carrying 50% of your companies revenue yourself and
• 14:13
  you're still running around and you're working like more hours a week and you never see
• 14:18
  your family.
• 14:19
  Your quality of life sucks, you've built yourself a super high paying job.
• 14:23
  And also you're not acquirable, like nobody will buy that business if you're doing 50%
• 14:27
  of the companies revenue and you're the one also managing all the people.
• 14:31
  So I think you'll have that wake up call it some everybody will have that wake up call,
• 14:36
  but that's a very crucial, there's very crucial inflection points in businesses.
• 14:40
  And I think that when you realize that if they don't move, if the founders are moving
• 14:44
  themselves, the business is going to die or they will, at the very, that's one of those
• 14:47
  inflection points, right?
• 14:49
  Where you have to start to hire out.
• 14:50
  I didn't know that your business went belly up during COVID, that sucks, that really sucks.
• 14:54
  It was all right, it was 18, so I had 18 employees in this thing.
• 14:58
  Yeah.
• 14:59
  It was very labor intensive and it was time to glad and don't say that we're just saying
• 15:09
  where we had trucks of returns coming from Amazon Walmart and Target.
• 15:12
  We had a big warehouse facility and I, a factory workers refurbishing goods.
• 15:17
  I'm very happy to do a podcast and do digital now and make it scalable and hire good teams
• 15:25
  and talent and, oh yeah, much better method.
• 15:28
  That does seem like a headache, however, you still could have, you still could have built
• 15:32
  that business and you still could have, at some point you can always fire yourself from
• 15:36
  a business, it's just a matter of how fast, right?
• 15:39
  Yes.
• 15:40
  A little bit faster with a self-service software product, of course, you could fire yourself
• 15:44
  almost immediately outside of, especially if you are a sales and marketing co-founder
• 15:50
  and you have a technical CTO co-founder and you can find a way to generate positive
• 15:56
  roas right out of the gate and you can wrap them, take that money and hire a great marketer
• 16:01
  and they can scale that.
• 16:02
  Same with this is why e-commerce is so popular as well, but if you have a SaaS product,
• 16:07
  you could fire yourself almost out of the gate.
• 16:09
  I know people that are running Chrome extensions that are doing million dollars a year and
• 16:14
  they're working like two, three hours a week, it's pretty wild what SaaS can do, but that's
• 16:17
  all about leverage, right?
• 16:19
  So you have to be smart about what you get into, but now you're in media.
• 16:22
  So there's a whole bunch of leverage there too, a whole bunch of leverage opportunities
• 16:25
  because you think about it, the work you do now, I think about this all the time.
• 16:30
  So the work I do now is not changed fundamentally from when I started the podcast and the work
• 16:36
  I will do in the future will probably be even less, less work, but revenue increases exponentially.
• 16:43
  So if I record an hour podcast and it gets seen by 10 people or 50 people or 500,000 people
• 16:50
  or 5 million people, it is still an hour and a half podcast.
• 16:54
  Now I've upskilled myself so I can ask better questions and I can have a better conversation
• 16:57
  and I'll get better guests, but ultimately it's not that different from when I first started.
• 17:03
  I'm just less nervous now.
• 17:04
  Let's see only different.
• 17:05
  One other thing I wanted to get into is your Michelin star story and how different way
• 17:12
  of something coming to be.
• 17:14
  The reason why when we were doing a little chat before we started this, you had said something
• 17:20
  about your business and you said like you were starting a podcast for your business,
• 17:27
  but we were talking about how the podcast shouldn't just be like a marketing channel for your
• 17:32
  business, it should stand alone and be so good that it competes with other podcasts.
• 17:40
  Whether or not it has a business function or a business value to it and the story of Michelin
• 17:48
  and the Michelin, so Michelin obviously is the tire company and you also know Michelin
• 17:54
  star, which is like the restaurant rating system and yes, they are related.
• 17:58
  So, what Michelin, the tire company originally did, you think about a tire company, you think
• 18:06
  about how old Michelin was, we're talking like decades old, they created tires and when they
• 18:13
  were creating tires there was not a lot of people who were driving, so they realized that if
• 18:18
  they want to make more tires and get more business, they need more people on the roads driving.
• 18:24
  So, they're like how do we get people to drive more and what they decided to do was they decided
• 18:28
  to make a guide of the best restaurants in Europe because they were a European-based company
• 18:33
  that people could road trip to and they would rate these restaurants and people would want a road
• 18:38
  trip outside of their city because they couldn't, like obviously if you're inside your city it's
• 18:44
  a little bit easier to get around, I'm sure at this point there would probably still some
• 18:47
  the horse-drawn garages, but if you want to go on long distance trips,
• 18:51
  car was the way to go, but there had to be incentive, there had to be a reason to go somewhere.
• 18:55
  So, Michelin was like let's put together a guide of the best restaurants around Europe
• 19:00
  and we'll incentivize people and almost at the angle of care, look at what you could go be
• 19:05
  eating at this restaurant all the way over here, guess how you're going to get there, you're
• 19:09
  probably going to have to get a car and they wanted to do this so that people would drive more,
• 19:13
  that was really the goal to sell more tires. So, fast forward, that guide has turned into the
• 19:18
  Michelin Star Guide for restaurants, rating the best restaurants in Europe, the point is they
• 19:24
  created this ancillary product that was originally meant to help their core business, but it was so
• 19:31
  good and it stood alone so well that ultimately it became a thing of its own and now the Michelin
• 19:38
  Star Guide for restaurants is such an important thing for chefs and restaurant owners and also
• 19:45
  bougie-ass foodies to pay attention to, that they don't even know that it was actually originally
• 19:51
  created by Michelin as a reason to sell more tires. So, the point is obviously this took decades to
• 19:56
  evolve into what it is right now, but if you can create something that helps your business like
• 20:02
  a podcast, make it so good that people listen to the podcast without ever knowing that it was
• 20:07
  actually created to serve a business function. And I think that when people think about marketing
• 20:13
  or creating anything, creating a YouTube channel, creating content on social, they think of it as
• 20:20
  like a means to an end and I think that means to an end, I understand why because they're just
• 20:27
  trying to achieve a business objective, but I think that if they thought of it as would this
• 20:33
  Instagram page be interesting even if you didn't buy a product from me or would this podcast
• 20:37
  be great to listen to even if you didn't buy my product or service, I again think they will have
• 20:43
  outsized returns and different opportunities to potentially monetize that they never even thought
• 20:48
  possible before. So, I really think that's a great story to take a lesson from because if you can
• 20:55
  create this marketing asset, it stands alone, it's going to have massive returns for your business,
• 21:02
  but I think it's just going to, I think it's going to be like just this huge net positive for you
• 21:06
  as a business owner or a founder. So, that's the Michelin story, which is one of my favorite stories,
• 21:11
  but I think that's a great marketing lesson to it. Yeah, I'm just taking care of what you do,
• 21:15
  right? If you're going to put the time into something, put some energy into it, even if you don't
• 21:21
  have a facet, how many brands have asked anything they do, they have asked their social, they have
• 21:26
  asked the corporate podcast they put out, they have asked whatever, it's wild to me and what's wild
• 21:32
  to me is they have asked all this stuff and the companies that don't have facet stand out, like
• 21:37
  Duolingo does not have facet or social and they've won marketing awards and everybody knows
• 21:40
  a stupid green aisle from Duolingo and they have a billion views on TikTok. If you were ever
• 21:46
  going to learn a language, who else would you go with? I don't even, I haven't even had a chance
• 21:51
  to learn a second, I know French, but not outside of French in English, I may have learned Spanish
• 21:55
  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
• 21:59
  a language, that's where I'm going because they have created this phenomenal tied into culture,
• 22:06
  marketing powerhouse across all their social, the woman, the mastermind of this whole Duolingo
• 22:10
  marketing strategy, she's won awards for this marketing strategy now. Point is, if you're going to
• 22:14
  create anything, create it to a level of excellence that it could compete with another Instagram
• 22:21
  channel that's just informative or just entertainment or if you're going to create a podcast for your
• 22:26
  business, create something that is again on par with the biggest podcasts in the world and the
• 22:31
  brands and the companies, they have the resources to do this, but they don't, and I think they should.
• 22:37
  If anybody in our audience wanted to listen to your podcast and the amount of energy and effort
• 22:42
  you put into that, how could they do so? You go to successstorypodcast.com, you can listen to
• 22:47
  everything there, all the socials that Scott declares on pretty easy to find, but I hope you guys
• 22:52
  all enjoy it. We do more stuff like this. Yeah, definitely. Everybody make sure to check out
• 22:55
  Scott's podcast, it's really a great lesson. I listened to quite a few episodes, I went around
• 22:59
  the time and I'll thank everybody for listening to another episode of failing to success. If you
• 23:04
  like the show, make sure to subscribe, I'm your host Shad Kalecki and we'll see you next time.
• 23:29
  you