Being consistent with the content of your brand is key to podcasting. Having a podcast plan no matter what day of the year it is means that you have a clear vision of what you want your listeners to take away from your podcasts. Join Dr. Minette Riordan as she explains how having a podcast plan will help you connect with your listeners.

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Today, we’re going to talk about a path to profit, which is really about having a podcast plan. I’m so excited to get to share this guest with you because Minette Riordan who is just this wonderful, creative, powerhouse woman that I’ve met. I first did an Inc. article on her and that’s how I met her and she was introduced to me by another associate. She just wowed me. I thought I was going to be this interview with an author about plans and her creative side just comes through in everything she does. Being a creative person, being a visionary, I see a lot of podcasters as visionaries, speaker authors that they’re that kind of personality. Whether you think of yourself as artistically creative but you are business creative. When you’re out there doing all of these really great things, sometimes you don’t have the structure underneath you. You don’t have the systems in place. You don’t have a plan. You don’t have a support maybe. She has a great approach for it which I absolutely love.

This is the second article I wrote about her. It’s really about how her business plan is so wonderful. You can use it as a business plan or you can use it as a marketing plan but it’s a creative task. It’s not sitting there and typing a dry business plan into a computer. It is using crayons and markers and thinking and visualizing and imagining your future and then planning and mapping it up. It’s absolutely fabulous and I love what she does. Let me tell you a little bit more about Minette just so you have a little bit more background. She is a bestselling author of two amazing books that I have read: The Artful Marketer, which I love that title. It is a fundamental business guide for creative entrepreneurs. The other book is called Instant Insights, A Time Management System for Creative Entrepreneurs. I have to tell you that I think I’m an organized person and I have really good time management skills and I still got great tips out of this that I could use that actually made me feel less constrained than the time management system I was using before that. It’s amazing what she has put together. She has a coaching practice that she coaches on doing these business and marketing plans. She works with her husband, Brad. They have Path to Profit Academy. It’s a course as well as these events that they run. I just find it so exciting that you could go to an event in a whole day, come out with your business plan and have had so much fun doing it in the process. I think what Minette and Brad are doing is just brilliant.

I also want all of our listeners to know that they have a podcast called The Path to Profit. They understand what those of you that are already podcasters, what you’re going through and the process that you need to go through to be successful at podcasting. That’s some of where this becomes particularly relevant for you, our listeners. We really wanted to invite her on so that we could really talk about whether or not it was the right thing to do to have a podcast plan. Should you have a plan going in our promises? Yes. It’s nice to have somebody else who thinks that as well and who has done that and gone before you. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say. Let’s go to the interview.

Listen to the podcast here:

The Path To Profit Is Having A Podcast Plan with Dr. Minette Riordan

Minette, I’m so glad to talk with you today and I’m glad to introduce you to Tom for the first time.

I’m so excited to be here. Tom, it’s so nice to meet you finally. I have heard a lot about you over the last couple of years.

Thank you. I have heard so much about you as well. I can’t believe we actually have not met in person yet at an event. This will work for now. It will happen at some point.

It will totally happen and I can’t wait for it to happen. I’m excited I actually got to meet Tracy in person this year.

That’s what happens so often both in podcasting and in the relationships that we’re developing as entrepreneurs, is so many of us just meet over Skype or Zoom or whatever it is that we use and we don’t actually get to see each other in person until we hit an event finally.

It’s crazy how close we live. I did another podcast interview and it turns out the guy is down the road in Venture. Who knew? I had no idea. It’s amazing. I love podcasting for the connections that I’ve been able to create from that and the friendships. It’s been wonderful.

That’s what I want to talk to you about because you are brilliant at business plans. What I really like is you have this great creative twist. I’ve written two articles about you. It’s just because I love the way your mind works because it allows us to be creative but provides a structure that’s so necessary. A lot of podcasters are speakers and authors and visionaries and that’s great, but you should still have a plan to back you up.

 

My husband and I host a podcast called The Path to Profit and we had talked about it for a long time before diving in because we knew it needed to be in alignment with our other goals. I love to talk. I’ve done a lot of radio back when Black Talk Radio was first starting out. I had a show over there. It felt easy to get started but it didn’t feel worth our time unless we were clear how it was going to benefit all the other things that we’re building. As a creative, and you can ask my poor, long suffering, husband, about trying to rain in my bright shiny ideas. He’s done a beautiful job of it to the point where every marketing strategy that we even think about implementing, we have to really ask ourselves, “Is this in alignment with our financial goals, with our overall marketing strategic goals? Is this going to get us where we want to go? Is it just another super fun, cool thing that we’d like to try?”

I totally agree. It’s just exactly the way we are here too. We talk about that here so often. Our mantra here is hope is not a plan. You can’t just start something and hope it’s going to work out. People do that with Facebook marketing and all kinds of things. Podcasting can be the same way. I think there is room in your plan for the intangibles. We talk about that a lot here. There are a lot of intangibles to podcasting and that is the connective network that you’ve developed. It’s really hard to quantify that. It does translate to profit at some point but it’s hard to quantify that all the time. Your creative process at building a business plan still allows for those intangibles, right?

Absolutely, it has to. We’re never going to stop being creative and it’s figuring out where do we want to put our time and energy. It’s a combination of, “Is this going to feed my business goals? Is it going to nurture me creatively? Is it going to be playful and fun?” Building business is hard. You guys know, you’ve been doing this for a long time just like we have. If it’s not playful, joyful and nurturing or nourishing, it’s too hard to continuously stay on that path especially with podcasting consistency. I would say consistency is a key to everything in business especially in marketing. With podcasting, to build any great following, to build any continuity or visibility in the marketplace, it’s all about being consistent. Those of us that are super creative don’t really excel at consistency.

You’ve written a book on time management, which I thought was the funniest thing as I bought your book. I go, “I’ve got a carved out time in my schedule to read a book about time management.” That’s really an interesting conundrum right there. You find time. You’ve managed to work that into your business plan and your schedule and everything that you do. How do you approach it?

It’s such a great question about how we’ve approached it. I, again, will just brag on my amazing husband, Brad, who is the king of systems. Brad created a great system in process for what’s happening on the backend so it’s easy to step into the moment of the fun part, which is doing the recordings and the interviews. Then my piece of that is finding the guests and connecting with the guests. We’ve even automated that part as well so that if I meet someone or connect with someone online, I think they’d be a great guest. All I have to do is send them a link and say, “Go here. Give me all your details, schedule a time that works best for you and let’s rock it from there.” Then we do all of our podcast recordings on the same day every week. We really try to stay in advance. This is really hard. Getting guests is harder than people think even though there are many people who say they want to be a guest. Finding the right guest that are also as creative as we are and successful in business and aligned with our themes, it takes some work. Making sure that you’re having some forethought in planning into the future. We’ve had a few times in our podcast journey and we’ve been going probably a year and a half now, I think we’re on episode 75. It’s that moment of, “Holy shit, we don’t have a show for this week,” and it’s supposed to go out tomorrow. Then being willing to jump in, do a show just the two of us. I find that it’s actually more fun the more organized we are because then we can relax into the moment and always be like we’re ahead of the game instead of chasing the microphone.

We do somewhere similar. We have some assistants who will pull a list of guests and propose people. In our industry, there are a lot of people we don’t know for our 3D print podcast for instance. On Feed Your Brand, it’s been so easy. I just ran down this whole list of all the people I’ve connected to in the last year and I’m like, “This person should be on the show and this person.” It was super easy to do that here. In 3D printing, we’re always looking for something new. I have a team out there who’s looking for that and they’ll prose them to us. We find it so much better, and you’re very right, to do that to be the person who actually asks and connects them. When the host asks, it works a lot faster than when an assistant does.

It does and I’ve tried both. I’ve tried even just having my assistant pull a list of names and it was that a-ha moment that all comes back to the time management systems and process and being so clear with your team about exactly what it is that you want because what I got back was a list of things that she was interested in and they were all great potential guests, but they weren’t necessarily aligned with the topics. It wasn’t anything that she was doing wrong. It was me having that a-ha light bulb moment of, “I need to be crystal clear about these other types of guests. Here’s exactly the topics that they need to be experts in.” Making sure that if you are sharing the work with other people that you’re so clear about what you want. I will say for me personally as a business owner that becoming a better person at delegating has been life-changing. I think I’m being clear and apparently I’m not being clear. What I think is common sense or obvious is not obvious and common sense to someone else. Learning how to clearly articulate your vision as the leader of your company has been just a really impactful part of my journey this year. It’s been a huge learning curve. It’s not my first time to have team. I ran a big sales team when I had my publishing company, but that was totally different. Even there, I was like, “Here’s everything you need to be successful. Go do it.” People need way more handholding than you think they do.

Especially when you have a very tight brand promise and I think that’s where you live and it’s certainly where I live. We really want to deliver this very specific style of brand promise to people.

I love that you said and I love that it shows that I have a tight brand promise, it makes me feel good. We’re doing the right thing. Sometimes you don’t know until you get that reflection back from other people. I would say for anyone that’s listening to this podcast today and is thinking about starting or has already started, if you haven’t put thought into, “Is your podcast aligned with your brand promise?” It’s an important question to ask because it will make it easy to say yes or no to guests. Sometimes when you’re starting and you have someone, an amazing expert like Tracy or Tom saying, “Best case scenario, you’re doing three shows a week or two shows a week,” and you’re like, “Holy wow, where am I going to find all these people?” Then you’ll start to take anybody that comes along. It can get scattered and feel inconsistent. From a time management and success, every area of your business, the more consistent you can be, the more successful you’re going to be. People love the consistency from the listenership perspective. It’s like, “Why am I so obsessed with Pat Flynn?” Smart Passive Income is one of my favorite podcasts. I listen to lots of different ones. I always go back to that one because of the consistency, the high quality of the content and the guests and the messaging. I know exactly what to expect and I know I’m going to walk away with some business-changing nugget from every single one of those shows. I think it’s so important to be clear about how do you want people to feel after they listened to your podcast.

There is this also clarity that you have about who and that makes a very big difference as well because when you really understand who your audience is or who you would like it to be, because if you haven’t started yet, you don’t know. Who you would like it to be and you express that then it’s really also easy to assess the guest as whether or not they’re fit or they will resonate.

I love talking about creatives and I am one. I make fun of all of us very affectionately. People don’t get us. If we have guests on the show who don’t understand that creative mindset or even if they worked with creatives, they have a sense of getting them. I can tell you how many other coaches I met in the last couple of years that are like, “Thank God, you’re working with creatives. They so need you. I don’t want them here, take them,” because it takes a certain amount of herding cats to get us all going in the right direction. I love working with creatives. I totally get them. Now, having Brad on my team, I can see how being a creative is both a gift and a huge challenge for the people around me. Together, we’ve been able to really clearly articulate what the process is to set creatives up for success.

I really resemble that remark. I’m very much a creative type. We’re similar in that regard but Tracy is also much more of a systems person and a much more organized person than I am. She drags me, kicking and screaming sometimes from my creative world into, “We have to have a process so we can get this done.” I completely relate. We have this process with our podcast like you do where we record all the uncertain days of the month and we have getting guests down to a system and how they get scheduled on our calendar and all that good stuff. That’s wonderful. I need to read this time management book though for the rest of the things I do and outside of the podcast.

It’s super short. It will take you 30 minutes to probably scan through it. I think I wrote it because I needed it. Do you ever have that moment where you’re writing a blog post and we’ve had some of those great a-has with the guests on our podcast. We just have the people on the show that we want to learn from a lot of times. Just remember when we’re struggling with time, what I have found is that we’re not clear about our goals. All the time management books won’t help anybody especially creatives if they’re not clear about their goals. Sometimes clarity around goals is something that creatives really struggle with because they just want to follow what’s fun and they’re not looking past the moment of, “This looks fun right now,” to “Is what’s fun right now going to really help me make any forward progress towards what I think that I want?” I have a goal setting on the mind this time of year. I don’t know about you guys, but we’re doing a lot of our 2018 business planning and goal setting and thinking about what are we doing differently and we’re totally following in your footsteps where we can’t just do one thing. We’re launching two new websites next year, completely topics that are unrelated to what we’re doing now. Just all these typical creative things but they feel so different this time around from this place of understanding the combination of creativity and systems to be able to easily launch multiple revenue streams, multiple podcasts, who knows, multiple websites that are producing content that are seemingly unconnected but that really pulled together our strengths and our passion so that we have a place for creative play as well as a place to practice all the things that we preach about building a business.

That was a tough thing for us this year. It was really earlier in the beginning of 2017. We had to decide. We had two distinct businesses that actually do relate, we’ve come to realize and should relate and complement each other, which is great. They are two different businesses and we had that struggle between, “Do we really focus on one and get it to a certain point and really back-burner the other one? Or can we do both at once? Should we do both at once?” We decided on the latter that we were going to do both. Tracy primarily focusing on one; I’m primarily focusing the other one but we’re both working in both of them and trying to move them both forward. That was a really tough thing. You have to be really organized. You’re not always as organized as you want to be doing it. It helps for us though that we have a tremendous team; our podcast induction team, it’s a system in its team and it’s replicate-able and it’s scalable. We had already gotten it to that point by midyear. For us, that just made everything easier in the process. You can’t do that without the planning part.

 

Now is the time to plan. I don’t care if it’s June, July, September, January 1st, every day is a great day to plan. I think so often we concentrate our planning at the beginning of the year and then we forget to review the plans along the way. It’s like the big binder your financial planner gives you and it sits on the shelf and collects dust for your entire financial plan for your life and you rarely review it unless maybe they meet with you once a year and they review it with you. A business plan has to be a living document that needs to be very visual and somehow out in front of you. This is true for your marketing plan or your podcast editorial calendar as well that these things have to be somewhere that you can see them and that you’re constantly coming back to them and asking yourself, “Am I on the right path? Do I need to go a different direction? Is this working?” Tom, I loved what you said because similarly have talked long and hard about, “Are we going to stick with this one thing? What does it look like if we start to add these pieces?” Like you guys, we have some great team members that can easily help us to implement these things. We don’t feel like we’re doing it all by ourselves by I would say to other creatives, if you don’t have a team, be really careful about what you take on because it’s so easy for creatives to say yes to fun projects and then instantly find ourselves overwhelmed by the amount of details, by the technology, by the need for that consistency. Plan, plan, plan every single day.

I also want to go back and touch on something you said earlier. We have really determined there are not a whole lot of absolute pre-requisites for getting into podcasting except the one major one is you need to have a brand. You need to understand what your brand is. Tracy said the brand promise. If there’s anything that should happen before you really get going in podcasting, establish what that brand is, what your mission is.

When we started our podcast on WTFFF on the 3D printing side, we actually didn’t know it was a market test. We wanted to test something specific. Is there a market for, in this case we didn’t want to create anything, the information? Because if there’s a market for the information about 3D printing and specifically designed related to 3D printing, then maybe there’s a market for the product eventually. Could we test that out and just dip our toe in the water with something simple without spending a ton of money and time in our business developing a product line and finding out it doesn’t sell. It was our way to use it as a test market. I do think there’s a way for people to use podcasts to test out ideas for whether or not this is going to work for a course or a book or an event and do all of that. They must be clear that that’s what they’re doing. They’re testing it.

I love that. I wrote that question down, “Is there a market for the information?” If there’s a market for the information, there will most likely at some point be a market for the product as well. That’s so brilliant. I love your brilliance always. I’ve had this conversation with a woman. There’s an amazing non-profit here in Santa Barbara called Women’s Economic Ventures that has self-employment training and business planning training for women and provides microloans to help them grow their businesses. I was meeting with the founder and she still sees people struggling so much that they come into the classroom excited about their idea and have failed to look and see are there people that would actually want this? We cannot create in a vacuum?

Market proof, that’s what I’m all about. Not enough people ask that question. They have this idea and because they love it, they think everybody is going to love it. It just is not always the case. In fact, often it is not the case. How are you going to found out? You need to prove it. It’s a good way to do it. Here you are, you’re training only in your time for the interviews, the recording and some amount of production. It’s not tremendously expensive in the process. You’re able to really test out ideas and see how they’re tracking with the people who are attracted to you which is really the important part. Obviously, you know creatives are attracted to you and you attract them in that way. Of course, they’re your listeners. When you get feedback from them that says, “This isn’t what I thought it was going to be,” now you really know to listen.

Listening is the key to marketing success in general and I think it’s the biggest mistake that I see creatives make and in particular artists. I would say artists struggle with this conversation because obviously they’re making art that they love or they’re inspired to make or called to make and they don’t believe that they need to ask the question around whether or not this is helping or serving someone else. I would posit that any painting will solve a specific problem for someone and it’s about the story and the conversation. All that translates into podcasting so beautifully where we have the amazing opportunity to tell the stories and to ask the questions, and to get information on a completely different platform. I know, Tracy, I remember you sharing the statistics at FreeCon about how few podcasts there are. It seems like there’s a lot of them but relative to other marketing platforms right now, it’s still pretty easy to get your voice heard in podcasting.

We both went to art school. I came to really understand that fine art often is more just the artist expressing their own vision. They don’t always care about or need to be mindful of how others are going to receive it. Very often artists really don’t care, “You either like it or you don’t, take it or leave. This is my vision, this my creation.” When it comes to design, which is a different path that creatives take instead of fine art design, and podcasts are similar in this regard, you are doing it for youself but you’re also doing it for a customer, an audience, a market that’s out there. You need to balance your own creative expression and needs and also the needs of a consumer of what you’re creating.

Design creatives, my point on it, is that our job is to be the advocate for the voice, the impact, the audience, whoever that is. Our job is to translate that into the product, the drawing graphic, whatever that might be, so that it has the impact, it has the message that it needs to carry. It has the features if you’re in product design like we are. Our job is to translate and understand what they need and what they want and be able to embody that. We’re a carrier.

This is such a juicy discussion or debate the fine art versus the design versus creativity, conversation, a lot. I do think that fine art actually solves the problem for people. It makes them feel something. It makes them feel inspired and long for something; great art and poetry. I have a PhD in Poetry. It’s the same way. It still evokes something in other people. Did you guys see the news about the Leonardo Da Vinci that’s just sold for $400 million almost $500 million?

Yes.

There’s something about fine art. I think we do create for ourselves. As an artist and a painter myself, I totally create what I love. If I want to make a living as an artist, I have to be conscious of not changing what I create but I think articulating the why and the how so that people can be engaged in the process in the story. I think a lot of us buy art for the story as much as for the product. Every piece of art in my house that I own or that I purchased or that I’ve been gifted has a story to tell.

An impact that it invokes something in you. I do think a lot of artists do not think about that. We wish they did but they don’t. That’s why maybe they don’t have sustainable artistic lives.

I’m a marketer at heart so I can’t not think like a marketer. Even as an artist, I still think like a marketer.

There’s no question that artists tell a story through what they create. That is often the case. Most often it does tell a story and that’s a whole part of their process. We have podcasters who are like that too. We have a couple of podcasters who are really all about stories and they tell stories every time they’re on. They attract a great audience because of that story. Where it’s been falling apart for some of them is that translation into actually what the business purpose and the plan is. It’s great when that story supports that plan, but when the stories are just the point, then it becomes a lot harder for it to be, “Wow, can I keep this up in my business?” or is it just, “It’s attracting an audience and it’s wonderful, but is it really doing anything for me and can I keep going at it?” That’s where it gets hard and that’s where we see a lot of podcasts fall off because it doesn’t have an integrated part with their business or with their goals and what they’re doing. They start to lose interest after a while.

I love that story. It’s the connection between everything and making sure what you’re starting is related to your end goals and being clear about those end goals from the beginning. As artists, I think we have the opportunity to do that and maybe we’re not conscious of that. I don’t know about you, they don’t teach you in art school. They didn’t teach me in poetry school how this stuff is all related to life or how we’re supposed to monetize this or how we can get past our own mindset of, “I can’t make money from my art. I can’t make money from my gifts and my talents.” I think it does come back. For me, I’m a huge fan of Simon Sinek’s concept of the big ‘Why.’ I think it comes back to really being crystal clear about the impact that we want to have and why we’re doing what we’re doing and that big why gets answered through every marketing strategy that we implement whether it’s write a book or a blog or record a podcast that everything is helping us to accomplish the ultimate end goal of the change that we want to see in the world. It sounds philosophical but I think business is philosophical especially for those of us that are solopreneurs or smaller companies.

I want to ask one more question. You started your show before you started your events. How did the lead generation happen? Did you use your podcast to help you generate people to come to your events?

 

It was the other way around. We actually started our live events before we started our podcast. I think we had done at least one, maybe two, live events. While our hope was that the podcast would lead directly to more registrations, we didn’t see the lead generation happen that way. What we did see was just increased awareness and visibility and maybe feedback like, “I can’t come this time but keep me posted about next time.” For us, the biggest benefit of the podcast has been visibility and increased awareness of who we are in the creative entrepreneur space.

It’s reversed. I like that. Do you use it to support post-event as well?

Absolutely because it’s so fun to share the success stories from our events and say, “We’re so excited. Here’s what happened. Here’s what you missed,” in a really loving, nice way of course, just making sure that people stay conscious of the events. I’m so glad you said that because what’s in my head right now is my need to schedule out events for 2018, which normally we have done by now. It’s so important. This goes back to the marketing planning and strategy piece that you should have your calendar scheduled a year in advance. Because then, you get to align your content with what’s happening in your business. It’s so important to have those plans as far out and as advanced. I resisted that as a creative so long and it’s been life-changing and business-changing. Brad has been brilliant at taking all the organizational tools that he learned as a software engineer for 25 years and bringing them into our business. They’re super practical. We need a plan. We need to have better implementation on the backend. We need to know what’s coming because the bigger you get, you can’t be agile anymore. You can’t switch gears as fast. When it was just me and my VA, it was easy to switch gears really quickly and we can’t do that anymore with a bigger business, bigger brand, more population. It’s so important to know what’s coming so that you’re not making everybody crazy.

We’re so glad you said that and we’re so glad you let us know about that because some people come in to it thinking it’s so going to be so easy to lead general. It’s not but word of mouth is helpful. It’s just not as tangible as most people think it’s going to be.

I would say to anybody that’s thinking about starting a podcast, don’t think you’re going to start getting clients tomorrow just because you started a podcast.

It takes time. It is a very valuable foundational level of marketing for you business if you do it right. It’s certainly for a lot of the people that work for us. We’ve seen case study after case study about how really critical it has been to supporting, marketing and even closing customers, clients in their business. Some it happens faster than others. It depends on the niche and about their mission and goals for their podcast. We see it being very effective.

I would totally give a plug for you guys that people need to know they don’t have to do it by themselves that they should get help. Just starting without really knowing what you’re doing is a little overwhelming. Trust me, when we started, we knew a little bit, we looked at a couple of things, we’ve looked at your course. We had some clear structure and direction of where we were going. Still, there’s been a learning curve. The technology piece is time-consuming so I highly recommend that people get support that they don’t have to do it all by themselves.

We appreciate that little plug there. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really enjoyed our conversation. I’m so glad you’ve got to meet Tom in the process too.

Thanks for having me. It was great to meet you, Tom. Talk to you again, Tracy.

It was our pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us.

The Path To Profit Is Having A Podcast Plan – Final Thoughts

That was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed interviewing Minette. It seems that she does agree with a lot of how we see podcasting and planning and the importance and brand and brand promise and all those things. Of course, time management being a huge thing. I can always use more help with that. Who couldn’t though? Earlier, I think I’m very organized and I’m feeling the anxiety of, “Minette is already starting on her 2018 plan and I haven’t even gotten into that.”

We have a lot of things planned for 2018 but it’s just not formalized yet. It can always be improved. The reality though of a plan is that you often do need to pivot. It’s not that having a plan out in front of you means you’re not going to deviate from it. It just means you have this guide post. You have this thing that you’re going to refer to and make sure, “I’m either on plan or I’m off plan. If I’m off plan, is that a bad thing or have circumstances changed and the plan needs to deviate?”

That’s why I like the way she referred it to. It’s not something you just stick on your shelf but that it’s living document and that you’re always referring to it and you’re always modifying it and you’re always adding to it and building off it and screening against it. That’s the part where I think we fail so often as entrepreneurs that we don’t got checked these things. We don’t have a way to check against them. We just go with the flow a lot. We don’t screen that back against brand promise and plan that we’re on. It distracts us and slows down our progress. I don’t think that it derails us completely but it does slow us down.

I know many of you listening probably are more creative types. That tends to be the case more often than not with podcasters or aspiring podcasters. There are exceptions for sure. Certainly, having a plan, time management, all those things are super critical. It’s one of the number one questions I get asked by new podcasters, “How do you manage recording episodes as many as you do and doing it consistently?” Of course, Minette reinforced that consistency is critical. I couldn’t agree more with her on that. It just comes down to systems and planning. If you need help with that and you’re one of our clients, make sure you actually tune in to our monthly webinar because not only do we often talk about some of those issues but you have the opportunity to ask any questions you want of us. Make sure to take advantage of that hopefully live because that way we can actually answer the questions. You can always see the recording but then you can’t ask a question so easily there. It’s really just about planning and executing, adopting, I would say, assisting. If you need help figuring that out, you know where to reach out for some help with that.

We’ll keep having podcast episodes about all the different things that we do and how we plan it and how we go about building these things. We’ve had lots of episodes on finding great guests and Minette was referring to that as a difficult point for her. It’s not about finding guests that’s hard. It’s making sure that they’re really right for you. I think that they have the most power that they can have. Sometimes we just are like, “That person is in front of me. I’m going to put him on the schedule.” I really do think that your time is valuable, their time is valuable. Let’s make it really great for both of us. That’s how I look at it. Really do want to spend a bit of time finding the right people.

There’s another episode where we talked about sometimes you realize in the middle of an interview that this maybe wasn’t the best guest choice. That’s okay, that’s going to happen once in a long while hopefully, but it’s going to happen. That doesn’t mean you have to publish it. This was definitely the right choice to have Minette on. She and I met because I was interviewing her for an article because she was referred to from a common acquaintance. I just had such an enjoyable time with her and then we’ve connected a couple of times over the year. Then we finally got to meet each other in Austin at the Freelance Conference or FreeCon as it was called. It was just so much fun to get to sit through her class and pull out crayons. For me, because I am a lot more farther along in my business, it was really interesting to sit in there with other freelancers as they didn’t even know how much money they wanted to make each year or didn’t have any idea how much their expenses were. I have those numbers because I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s not my first business. These are easier things and so it’s a really difference to see how much impact she could have on this small group of people who are starting out freelance designers and coders and just in all different types of areas, but they don’t have quite the business skills in front of them. The concepts of, “I have to know this and think about this and have a plan for this,” was the a-ha for them.

You need to know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. If any of these particular areas are not in your wheelhouse, if it’s one of your weak areas or Achilles heel, something you need to work more on, please come to BrandcastingYou.com or reach out to us on social media @FeedYourBrand.

Thanks again for listening. This has been Tracy and Tom on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• Minette Riordan
• The Artful Marketer
• Instant Insights, A Time Management System for Creative Entrepreneurs
• Path to Profit Academy
• The Path to Profit
• Smart Passive Income
• Women’s Economic Ventures
• Black Talk Radio

About Dr. Minette Riordan

Award-Winning Entrepreneur and Best-Selling Author, Dr. Minette Riordan successfully built a multi-media publishing company, turning a small quarterly newspaper into a monthly magazine with a circulation of 50,000 copies distributed through over 300 locations around the Dallas Ft. Worth Metroplex.
After a decade in the publishing industry, Minette realized that what she loved most was coaching creative women entrepreneurs with big dreams on how to build a profitable business. She sold her publishing company and relocated her family to beautiful Santa Barbara, CA.
She is the author of the best-selling books The Artful Marketer: The Fundamental Business Guide for Creative Entrepreneurs and Instant Insights: A Time Management System for Creative Entrepreneurs.
She runs her thriving coaching practice with her husband from her home near the beach and when she’s not working, she loves spending time with her family, taking long walks on the beach, making art or enjoying a glass of red wine.

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