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Tactical Batching For Hosts Who Refuse To Miss An Episode · Your Mic

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  Some towns measure storms with radars. FEMA has satellites up in space, maps,
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  acronyms, a whole bunch of alphabets, soup, kind of junk, and down here in the real world,
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  I'm in the South, baby. We have lawful house.
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  Think about it. Hurricane season between May and November, and here in the Houston area,
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  it is really bad in August and September. There was a guy who was studying this, who worked
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  inside FEMA, and he developed what they call the Walfall House Index, and he had like a red,
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  green, and yellow sort of a system going. Green meaning they were open, and they were serving
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  the whole menu, and everybody was going about their business as if there was not flooding or
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  tarantial downpours or 150 mile per hour winds. Yellow would be limited menu, and then red,
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  well, pardon my French, but the shit hit the fan, and nobody's going to work, and nobody wants
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  to go out to eat because well, they're worried about their roof collapsing. And so we're going to
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  work on that during this episode of your mic. We are going to steal a play straight from the
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  Walfall House in FEMA handbook. So think about your podcast, and what green means, you're open,
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  you're rolling. Yellow, maybe you've got a limited arsenal, red. Oh man, things are bad.
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  So when we build this version of that index for your podcast, and I want you to think about some
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  exact prompts that I'm going to be dropping in my show note. So I'm going to take you to a page,
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  you're going to get it for free, and you can use this to plan your podcast as if you were planning
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  for the worst possible thing like Walfall House does. And so the backstory is that back in the day,
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  and if you're up north and you're listening, or if you're out of the states, I know we have some
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  listeners up in France. Walfall House is a very strange beast, and that's putting it lightly.
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  Putting it very, very lightly. So Walfall House, they've got about 2,000 stores here in the
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  United States, mostly down in the southern part of the country, and they're famous for being open
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  all year round. And so when they close, it's actually a big damn deal. Okay, so there's this guy.
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  He noticed it. I mentioned him earlier. This is a guy who noticed that during hurricanes and
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  natural disasters that these stores were open, and not necessarily closing like everybody else,
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  right? So they developed the Walfall House index. Again, red was things have gone awry,
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  and nobody's going to work at Walfall House, and no one's going to eat yellow, limited menu,
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  maybe a few crazies, maybe some college kids who just, I don't know, maybe don't know better,
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  maybe you're not scared of the elements like us old folk, and then there's green where, well,
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  maybe the weather's really not that bad, and the national media is making a big deal out of nothing
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  because the menu's full. The supply chain is going and trucking along, and everyone's going to
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  get their hash browns and coffee and breakfast. And so that's the index, green, yellow, red.
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  So for your podcast, let's develop that index, that Walfall House index for your podcast, green.
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  It's going to be when you have four to six episodes fully produced and in the bank and scheduled.
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  We're talking titled and links with your show notes. Everything is completely done,
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  edited, produced, uploaded to the cloud, and boom, you don't have to worry about a thing for weeks.
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  Yellow, maybe you're down to like two or three episodes, and you've got a few of them outlined.
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  Red, we've all been there, especially if you're a new podcaster, and I got to tell you that,
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  even in the throes of my early days of running speak podcasting, I would find myself
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  recording and producing an episode the night before it was supposed to be published.
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  And that was stressful. And if you knew me, you would know that my hard line is to never miss
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  a publishing date. And I was so adamant about never missing a date of an episode of Cruise Through
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  HTX, or my first failed podcast, Freddy's huge ask podcast, that I would literally be up at 11 o'clock
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  at night, the night before publishing day. And I would be editing and I would sneak the episode in
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  right before the buzzard. I think I probably got up to like 1150 something where I scheduled it,
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  and it was out like with minutes to spare. That was how hard knows I was. But that's red when
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  you're flying by the seat of your pants. And as a business owner, as a C suite level executive,
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  whether it's for a company or a nonprofit, that is no way to live. You do not want your podcast,
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  or your business or organization to be held hostage by your publishing schedule, a podcast to
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  quote my client Dorothy Gibbons from the Rose, who at the time of this airing may or may not
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  already be retired. But you know, when we first started with her podcast, she was like,
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  Freddy, this has to be fun. And it should be fun. It has to be fun. You should never feel like
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  your podcast is holding you hostage ever. So think about that framework when it comes to
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  planning your podcast. Green, you got four to six episodes in the can. Again, yellow,
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  maybe two to three, you got some, some episodes outlined and then red, you're flying by the seat
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  of your pants and it's very stressful and you're white knuckling it.
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  So we're going to use a couple of examples because this will give you an idea if maybe you
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  haven't started yet or maybe you just started and you're just a few episodes in our longest
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  running client, who is also our most successful client, the Rose and their podcast. Let's talk about
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  your breasts. We started recording in late 2022 and we launched in early 2023 with 19 audio
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  episodes produced and in the can and scheduled. That is amazing. Another example will be Dr. Terry
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  and Samuels who hired us to produce the menopause. Her podcast was recorded and filmed in 2024 and we
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  had all of our audio episodes fully produced in in the can and some of her video episodes too as
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  well as as well as the short form videos ready to go when she launched in December of 2024.
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  And then she had her second season, her spin off season sex after 70. She had that fully produced
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  by the end of 2025. So all over audio episodes ready to go a handful of video episodes and some
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  of the short form videos for the entire calendar year 2025 to gold star examples and it sounds
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  heavy. It sounds like a lot when you think about it, you also want to consider how bad you want to
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  make a difference when it comes to being the official voice of your industry or if you've got a
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  story to tell if it's a personal story and how how important it is for you to get it out there.
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  Green, yellow, red. I'll just record what I'm inspired is not a strategy.
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  So what do we take away from this? Busy entrepreneurs and hosts don't need more inspiration. A true
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  pro is going to work through all the stress and yeah, it will be stressful in the beginning and
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  even when you're a year or two years in, things happen. And if you don't have some sort of a system
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  in place that's going to keep you from falling off the rails and then possibly ghosting your
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  podcast feed and then you find yourself ending it, well, then what was all that work for to begin with?
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  So when stuff does fall apart or when it starts to fall apart or when you're thinking that it
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  might fall apart, consider who you're going to hire to come in and help you with all of the workload
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  because if you're doing it all on your own, that's again, no way to live. You don't want to be
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  hostage to your podcast because then the podcast is also going to be holding your personal life
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  and hopefully not, but maybe even your business too. So you have to think about whether or not you
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  want to bring in an editor, whether that's a VA or if it's someone overseas or if that's somebody
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  you know who's good with audio, who might be able to do you a favor. Maybe it's a producer who can
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  slide in and put in an evergreen episode from a year or two years ago. Maybe you pre-record a
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  couple of episodes and you keep them on the back burner and you never use them until something
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  goes sideways. You record those episodes for the sole reason that when stuff goes south,
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  when you are in the throes of hurricane season that you have something to fall back on.
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  This is where guesting actually comes into play. So if you have an appearance or a few
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  appearances and we recently did this for Dr. Storm too, we had a couple of appearances for her.
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  And so that's a perfect example of being able to repurpose content that is already out there
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  and you can just call in a favor and say, hey, I was on your show a while back. Would you mind if
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  I used that audio as a feed drop and I recorded custom intro and outro and linked to your show
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  in the show notes. And I could almost guarantee you that a podcast host who gets that ask would be
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  honored and more than willing to share that file with you. I know I would be. And so that's another
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  thing for you to consider. Quick exercises for you to do. This is going to be four phases.
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  The first one is going to be your idea sweep. So get out of a blank piece of paper, open up your
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  notes app, whatever. And just for lack of a better term, vomit out every single idea that you would
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  have for an episode. Just go go hard for if you can do an hour, if you can do an hour and a half
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  amazing every single idea that you have for an episode, you want to put it down and you want to
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  you want to document it. Phase two is going to be a sorting of all those ideas. Take the ones that
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  sort of rise to the top. The ones that are really sticky. Take those, spend about a half an hour,
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  maybe 45 minutes organizing all those. Think about this as a puzzle. Organize those thoughts
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  into wow, this will be a great episode. This will be a great episode. This one and the kind of
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  sucks. Oh, this one, we're going to keep it, but I'm going to put it at the bottom of the list
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  because I kind of want to refine that idea. Phase three is going to be where you outline those
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  episode ideas. So you want to give like three no more than five bullet points because then you're
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  going to want sub bullets for each bullet point. And then phase four is where you're going to
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  script the critical pieces. And I can tell you from personal experience, the parts where
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  things tend to go off the rails is going to be the beginning and then an example or a mini case
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  and then your CTA. Those are going to be the three spots that you would want to script the most.
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  And if it's a video podcast, what you can do is if you find yourself reading verbatim and looking
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  down the entire time, well, what you can do is have your video editor layer in some B roll or
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  motion graphics or both over the part where you're clearly looking down at a script. It helps
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  and it even adds a little more production value to your episode. So again, your call opens,
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  your case studies and examples, transitions between segments and then your CTAs, your calls to action
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  as well at the very end. And so then what you're going to do is feed this to the robot.
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  My favorite robot is perplexity. Those who know me are probably sick of me talking about how amazing
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  my perplexity chatbot is. I feel like it knows me sometimes better than I know myself. I've got
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  all of my blog posts, news articles, interviews with me that have been conducted by other people,
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  podcast transcripts. I've written three fiction books. I've got an unpublished nonfiction book
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  uploaded to my perplexity chatbot so it knows my writing style and it feels like it knows
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  me like very intimately. And so what you're going to want to do is have your chatbot and do the
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  same with your chatbot and then have it script for you episodes. And then what you'll do is not
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  use it verbatim. You'll go in like a junior editor and take out what you don't want in it and then
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  add more context if it's missing context. And that's the gig. That is how you say open
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  all year round. During this episode we have sought out the potential hurricane, the tornado,
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  the blizzard that might just take out your podcast because the real world happens. Fires happen
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  as a business owner you probably know it as a high level executive for a business or a non-profit
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  as a founder. You know that fires can and will happen. It seems during Q1 and 2026 that I've
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  woken up to one every single morning and that's okay. It is to be expected because we plan for the
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  worst and that's the gig. So don't forget to check out the link in the show notes. I've got the
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  Waffle House prompts for you so you can apply them to this index to your podcast and if you know
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  a host that probably should get their stuff together well you can share this episode with them.
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  Really appreciate you listening.