Founder Of Pikkal & Co: Graham Brown AKA The Podcast Boss – S3E13 (#109)

S3E13 Graham Brown.mp3 – powered by Happy Scribe

Boss Uncaged is a weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners and entrepreneurs as they become uncaged trailblazers. In each episode, our hosts, S.A Grant And guests, construct narrative accounts of their collective business journeys and growth strategies, learn key success habits, and how to stay motivated through failure, all while developing a Boss Uncaged mindset. Break out of your cage and welcome our host, S.A Grant.

Welcome back to Boss Uncaged Podcast. Today we got a special guest, and I like to deem whoever I’m interviewing by a particular name. So in this episode, I’m going to deem this individual the podcast boss. So without further ado, graham, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

Thank you, man. I’m very privileged to be called the podcast boss and from the boss himself. That’s what I do. I podcast. I help companies podcast. I help some of the world’s largest organizations create podcasts companies like McKinsey, IBM, here in Asia, as well as some government agencies, investment banks, people you typically wouldn’t think would do podcasts. It wouldn’t actually be storytellers or out there in the public domain, but that’s what we do, as well as helping entrepreneurs tell their stories. It’s really about storytelling. So it’s all about telling your story on your terms in a very human and authentic way. And I’ve been doing that for years, and it just so happens now it’s a thing called podcasting, which people are paying for. So delighted to be here on a podcast with a fellow podcast. I’m looking forward to this.

I’m actually looking forward to it as well. I think you kind of alluded to a couple of things right now. Like, we were talking about the time code differences, because I think you’re like 1011 hours ahead, you’re in Singapore, and I just really want to kind of dive into that story. I mean, you had an opportunity within the last ten years, you do everything out, you sold everything, and then you decide to grab your family and travel the world. So let’s kind of just jump off with that. What was that experience like?

It’s an adventure, let me put it that way. You see, one thing you learn about when you are living out of a suitcase, as much as it’s glamorous going on vacation, that you really are living by virtue of your story, your hands, and what you have right in front of you. You don’t own anything effectively. So the highs are very high in that kind of life. You’re living on tropical islands, amazing sunsets, and you’re very free, but at the same time, your lows are very low. You don’t have that safety net. You don’t have that connection with a community that you would have necessarily maybe in Georgia, Atlanta, or wherever you grew up or wherever your birth community was, or your college friends or your work colleagues. So that sort of isn’t there. So it’s a bumpy ride, but it’s an amazing one. I think I would recommend it to only somebody who, firstly, you’ve got to have a very stable relationship with your wife that will really test it and your family, and you really need to know what you’re doing when you’re doing it. Going and traveling around the world for four years, as we did, is a real challenge and it really challenges you in many ways.

It really just pulls you at many different angles and makes you reassess what it is to be an entrepreneur. And views on commonly held views about success.

Nice. So this continues to keep pain. Obviously, we’re both storytellers, in a sense. Right. So on this journey, I think you also had an opportunity to train for a marathon. It wasn’t just any kind of marathon. Let’s just kind of dive into that. So not only did you pick up your family and you’re traveling the world, not only are you an entrepreneur, there’s a little side of an adrenaline junkie in you as well.

Yeah. Are you a sporty guy? You’re into, like, crazy challenges?

Yeah, I’m a rock climber by nature. I love climbing rocks. Recently, I picked up sailing, so I’m also a sailor now as well.

All right, so you like the adrenaline, you like the edge a little bit. Rock climbing? Yeah. I was never really good at that, but that appeals to me. I like that kind of thing on the edge a little bit. But I did in the Ironman, which is a swim bike, and it finishes with a marathon. So one of the things I always wanted to do as a bucket list item on my list was to complete an Iron Man, and I was on the wrong side of 40 at the time, just turned. And in part of our travel plans, we were going to go and check out all these islands to live and just take it easy for four years. And one of the things we ended up doing was going to the Canary Islands. Now, the Canary Islands are off the west coast of Africa. They’re part of Spain politically, but geographically, they’re right off the west coast of the Horn. Right. So you’ve got, effectively, the climate of Africa, but the culture of Europe, which is like a strange mix and it’s volcanic. But you can go there and do the Ironman because it’s a great place and all the pros go there, all the athletes go there.

So I pitched my wife on this idea, why don’t we go and live there? And for a while, this was like 18 months, and I could train for the Ironman because I can actually live with the pros. You could go out cycling and they will be on the road. Some of the world champions will be out on the same roads as you, and you could get to learn the course. And fortunately, she said yes. It was an experience I think you’ve just got to do some crazy things in your life, right? Why not? It’s not a rehearsal.

Yeah, definitely. So with that, I mean, I was just kind of laying down the ground floor for our listeners, kind of really understand parts of who you are, a little bit of your journey. So in self defining yourself, right, if you could choose three to five words, what three to five words would you use to define who you are?

That’s a good question. Let me think about this. The first one has to be storyteller because that, I feel, is a craft that touches many things. You’re an entrepreneur, I’m an entrepreneur. We shared spirits in the sense that we tell stories. One storyteller, two adventurer, because you can go through life as a traveler or tourist. You take your pick. Do you want to look at the world through the window of a coach or do you want to be getting lost in the backstreets? That’s the choice that we can make in life, right? Entrepreneur. Because that is how I make my money. And that’s the path we’ve chosen both and imagine your listeners as well. Many of them have chosen that path, is a conscious choice. Author because I love to write that’s four. I have to think of a fifth one. Is that necessary? Can I get away with four?

No, four or four is definitely fine. Again, to your point, we’re just layering it. I look at these conversations as like paintings. You kind of have to put a base coat and you put a layer on top and detail so you get finished product. So just to dive into like, your business a little bit. So obviously you’re entrepreneur, you’re a world traveler, and you have these different aspects to your life, and they’re all entangled into one person taking these life experiences, and you’re delegating them in a fashion that you can help other businesses. Like you said, you name a couple Fortune 500 companies. You’re also helping entrepreneurs in this journey as well. How do you do that in your business? I mean, you’re talking about podcast. What are you actually doing with podcasts?

So we have an agency, a podcast production agency, which will take an idea and turn it into a successful podcast. Now, there’s a lot of work, as you know, that goes into that. It looks easy, but the actual hard part isn’t necessarily the production, it’s the promotion, the audience growth. It’s really making a success because production is becoming a lot easier with podcasts. Now what’s becoming harder is getting people’s attention and creating compelling content as well. Because a lot of brands start from the perspective of, this is what I want to talk about. But actually it never starts like that or should start like that. It should always be, what does your audience want to hear. So there’s always a gap between where a brand starts and what is a success. And a key part, increasingly a part of what we do, a major part of what we do, is helping them grow at that audience, that podcast, whether that means increasing their rankings or growing the community around their podcast. Because we’ve gone beyond the days where you could just have a podcast and you’ve got an audience, right. Those days are gone and now the production values are going up and the competition is getting harder on the platforms as well.

So that’s what we do. We take an idea and turn it into a successful podcast. So that is what we do mainly here in Asia. And we’re behind, we’re about three or four years behind you guys, I think, in the US. Every conversation you’ve had about podcast four years ago, we’re having now. Wow. So you can imagine the uphill.

I think that gives you kind of not only a head start, but it gives you more of an unfair advantage in that market sector because you have something to model after, to see what’s working, what’s not working, and then bring that culture up to speed. So you’re always a leading provider in that space. Is that a true saving?

It is, yeah. I think it’s a good analysis. However, the caveat is that you have to stay solvent long enough to be able to do that, because in the US, you’re enjoying larger budgets, much more mature markets, and growing audiences. Right. And that now has become a commercial viability. However, in Asia, it’s now a case where there isn’t a wondery, there isn’t the sort of high production, serial type podcasts that you have in the US. They don’t have a Joe Rogan yet, even though everybody knows Joe Rogan here. And so the consciousness of one podcast are isn’t there yet. That collective understanding isn’t there. So the people who are doing it are pioneers. There isn’t a mass market in the US. You would have a lawyer doing a podcast or a dentist doing a podcast. You don’t have that here. Here it’s a few American HQs and then a few pioneers, and that’s it. So to your point, your analysis is spot on. The challenge now is sticking around because you could be the one that educates the market for somebody else later on. That’s always the risk of frontrunning the market. And the reason why it’s worth doubling down on Asia is numbers, 4 billion people.

Think about that.

Yeah. Latin numbers.

Those numbers add up. And that’s what we’re in the game for, because you’ve got the world’s largest middle class here. Two thirds of the world’s middle class will be living in Asia by the end of this decade. Right. Think about that. So they will be consuming podcasts and they will be targets for people through podcasts for SA Grant. Right. So that’s really exciting, but you have to hang on long enough.

Yeah. I think all the analytic data that you just presented with us. It kind of gives any entrepreneur, any podcaster universally, an opportunity to kind of really think about that. To your point, four point four billion. I mean, podcast is game. So in the US, it’s 300,000,004.4 billion, 98 difference in those numbers. So going into that, what other hurdles have you had to face? I mean, I think there’s probably a language barrier to a certain extent, right? And you’re talking to business owners that can be A type personalities no matter where you are in the world. So what is the worst experience you’ve had in developing a podcast with a client to date?

The worst experience?

The worst experience?

Yes. Oh, where do you start? So there’s been a few. It’s been a learning experience. And I can’t name names. Obviously, it’s unfair. They’re not here to defend themselves. And to be honest, it was mainly my mistake and our team’s mistakes. I think at the beginning, we didn’t really know what a podcast should be or how it could be, or read the market very well. In 2018, when we started our agency, when I moved from Japan to Singapore to start the business, then it really was, okay, I’m doing podcasting. Who’s interested? We didn’t know anything about how do you price it, we didn’t know about how do you make it success. So one of our early clients, I won’t name them, but they’re a large software company, wanted to use the podcast to sell software, so they wanted to sell subscriptions. And in the early days, we take anything. So we took the deal, but it ended up being a little bit of a miscommunication, let’s just put it that way, a fallout. Because, listen, if you want to sell software, do Facebook ads, do Instagram ads, don’t do a podcast. Podcasts are about connection.

They’re about top of funnel. They’re about driving acquisition of high end ticket items, more of a conceptual sell. So that was a really hard learning experience for us, right? Because, you know, the client was disappointed very much. Even though the podcast was really good, it was just not delivering them the ROI. And that is the problem. If you sell a podcast and that podcast is now run by a marketing manager, what are they going to say? They’re going to say, oh, how many widgets can I sell with this thing? That’s what they’re thinking about, which is very different for pitching it to a leader or a CEO, because they’ll do it because they understand this is about story. It’s about top of funnel and shaping that narrative all the way down. And that I didn’t know at the beginning. And that was a failure. I don’t think it was a disaster. There’s always something good that came out of it.

Got you. I definitely appreciate that. Not only are you defining and telling the story, but it gives an opportunity for a listener to comprehend that podcasting. To your point, it’s top of funnel. It’s not necessarily going to be the goal. Mine results the way you speak and I sell a product and then you get a million sales. It’s about nurturing that audience and it’s more of a longer holding of it on. It’s not just come in and purchase a lead, it’s come in and listen week or day after day after day and raising their hands and communicating and building that culture. So I definitely appreciate you adding that, because that’s what really podcasting is all about. Would you concur with that?

Yeah, absolutely. And the high end ability to sit and have a conversation with a potential business partner, a potential advocate. After this podcast, I’ll be telling people about boss uncaged. Right? So I’m a fan. You think about that as your marketing department now. And then also let’s think about it in terms of business development. If you’re a boss, if you’re a CEO, if you’re a leader, you’re the top sales guy. You have to be. We all live by selling. If you’re a CEO, you’re the main salesperson in that business. Whether or not you think of yourself as a salesperson is different, but you are selling the business day in, day out. Even when you’re emptying the trash, you’re still the top sales guy. And that is really important because I sat with leads, effectively, prospects who would have been impossible to meet, who’d be impossible to knock on the doors of. But I sat with my podcast. I have sat with two billionaires and I had meetings with them, did podcasts with them, and I did business with both of them afterwards as a result of the podcast. Now, when people ask me about the ROI podcast, I say, look at that.

There is no way that you could have sat with the CEO of AirAsia, who is probably one of the he’s the equivalent of Mark Cuban in Asia, do a podcast with someone like that and then win business with his brand. And I always point to that and say, that to me is the ROI. All the other stuff is a bonus as well. Yeah, absolutely. Top of fire. But there’s the hard evidence of what you can do in acquisition with podcast if you use it properly.

Yeah, I 100% agree with you. And I looked at some of that video with you interviewing him, and I want people to make an opportunity out to go to your brand and we get to the point of podcast where we do some promotion for you. But I want people to look at that particular video and like, you started off that video more. So in a conversation. It wasn’t just diving into meat potatoes. He was asking about his workout routine. Right. And you would think, I have opportunity to talk to an executive, I want to hear numbers, I want to hear strategy. You started off a lot smoother and kind of went into the back door, asked him about his workout routine, then he was kind of like, Where is this going? Losing weight has always been an issue for me. Then that kind of opens up the door for the tension levels to drop and for you to kind of just ease in and get to the meat and potatoes later. So I definitely appreciate your style of storytelling because it’s intuitive in the sense that it’s giving the person the opportunity to grow into you.

And I see why you did this is to be you didn’t just jump off the bat and start attacking them about the general information, about how did he get how did he become the CEO of such a large corporation.

One thing I thought about when I reflect on that interview, that conversation, I guess, and you talk about the style of the conversation, the flow is somebody like Tony Fernandez, who the CEO of A Razor is, and he’s a maverick. He’s like a Mark Cuban as that sort of style, who is very brash, very outspoken, and somebody like him could appear anywhere. He could be on any media he wanted to be in. So why would he choose to be on a podcast? And I thought about that, and one of the reasons is, for example, what you talked about is that he could talk and tell his story in his own words. And if you imagine if you are a celebrity entrepreneur, probably one of the hardest things about being in that situation is that you’re always putting on an act, you’re always performing, whether that’s for the shareholders or for the media or for your immediate reports, that always you’re having to put this face on. But, yeah, you can sit on the podcast and have this man to man conversation and just be yourself. And I think that must be very liberating. And you see that you see this kind of media developing today where stars are doing very normal things, like in the back of the car, singing karaoke, all that kind of nonsense, right?

If you think about it, why are people doing this? It’s because I think stars, celebrities want to tell their story on their terms. They want they want to be surrounded by people who call them Mr. Fernandez and, you know, with too much reverence, they want somebody to speak to them at the equal level, and for them, it’s very much a rarity. So I was reading Barack Obama talking about his, you know, how fame affected him, and he said, one thing I really missed about being the president was just sitting in Central Park and just watching people walk by. That was the thing I missed the most, because he couldn’t do that anywhere. He was like a celebrity. And you can imagine now to give them that back. That’s what podcast does. It’s liberating for these people. And people think when they approach these CEOs and these grand titles that, oh, you know, I don’t know if I can speak to that billionaire or that celebrity, but you got to think about what you’re offering them that they can’t get anywhere else. And I think that is overseen in podcasts.

I think that that’s a solid point. And I think in today’s world, you start to see that more and more with the CEO. The prime example is Facebook Mark. Right? If you look at Mark’s profile within the last six months, it’s funny because the comments are like, you’re human. How is this possible? Right? Because he’s posting random information about him and his family. He’s posting information about things that he likes to do. He’s actually playing Halo. Mark playing Halo and everyone’s kind of like, Mark is playing Halo. What the hell is the world coming to this? When did Mark using his own product? But it goes to your point. I mean, you want to show more of your human side. You just want to be able to, like you said with Obama, be able to go to Central Park and sit down. And unfortunately, you can’t. So you have to use these platforms in order to get that extra that you would have before that you don’t have access to anymore. And I think that’s a solid point. I definitely appreciate you adding and sharing that. Definitely.

Do you think when you saw the Mark Zuckerberg post, did you feel authentic? Did you feel genuine or did you feel it was staged?

Well, I think because of Mark, I think Mark is at the pinnacle point of his career, right? I mean, he’s not 20 years old no more. He’s kind of creeping up more. And so in the he’s kind of where if we go back to Microsoft and looking at what those executive board members were doing at that point, I think he’s at that point, he’s done so much. He’s a multi billionaire. He’s in the top 1% of the 1%. There’s only so much more he can kind of do now. He kind of wants to live and enjoy his life. So I think it’s a genuine effort, but it’s going to take the user audience a period of time to really believe that’s really going to take kind of like podcasts. You have to kind of do it routinely for a period of time to own up to that skill set and to actually get into your zone, into your groove. So I think he’s building up to that. I don’t think he’s there yet, but by this time next year, if he continues to do it, I think people are going to be like, oh, this is Mark.

He does it all the time.

Yeah. That’s a great thing, though, if you can get to that stage, it’s believable because surely that must be liberating for him, right?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So let’s talk a little bit more about I love this conversation because it’s so organic in nature, right? But I really want to dive more into your company structure a little bit. So you’re helping podcasters on journeys, but in this you have to figure out the formula. Earlier on this episode you were talking about, you had some hurdles, you had to overcome those hurdles. So systematically now you have a system in place, you figured out pricing, you figured out like logistics, you figure out the steps and procedures. What systems do you have when somebody comes to you that you put in place to get them from point A to point B?

Yeah, good process is really important here because effectively if you can reduce the cost of servicing a client with good operations, then you can firstly you can focus more time on that client and obviously it’s more profitable. So having the process is really important and that means having good data and good metrics. So we’re quite obsessive with metrics for a small company. We’ll track everything. We will track for example, the time to deliver. So we have like a TTD metric, which is, imagine for example, we were Amazon warehouse and you were tracking when the order was made, when the order was picked in the warehouse, and then when it was out the door into the delivery van. Now that’s a process which seems to be quite simple, but actually it’s extremely complicated because where is that order right now? Somebody picked this order but it’s somewhere in the warehouse and there’s something missing and that guy is on vacation today, right? You can imagine how difficult that becomes as you scale. It’s easy when it’s all in your head or it’s in your engineers head, but then you have this situation where we need to get it out because as long as it stays in our heads and we don’t have a visual of it, we cannot scale this business.

So one of the challenges we had early on was creating visuals. And this is something I learned from Amazon, which was a visual display of your business at any one time. So if you were in the warehouse business, you could see where a package was at any particular time. This parcel is in zone D and it’s being shipped tomorrow. In the same way we can see at any one time where an episode is, what’s happening to it. So is it in editing, is it in review, is it being shipped, is it being published? Etc, etc. In that stage, that sequence? And it may sound obsessive, but a number of things happen when you have these really good systems in place. Firstly, you can see where the choke points in your business are, right? So why are we taking three days for review? Why is it taking this amount of time to move from one step to the next step in the system in the process? And the second thing is, once you can understand times and you can understand the data about your business, you can also understand the cost, truly, because a small business, so much of it is hidden cost.

For example, you can take on a gig, you can take on a client, you can take on a service, but actually they may be very costly to you. And those are hard truths that you have to face. And what I found and what we found in the business, I’m sure your experience may be the same, is that actually, to grow a business, it’s not about taking on more and more, but it’s increasingly about saying no to things. What do I say no to? Because then you can say, okay, we don’t do that kind of podcast. We don’t do that kind of client. And you can only say that when you’ve got the data. So a very important part of any small business to grow is having a system, and the system relies on processing data, and you’ve got to get obsessive about it. You’ve got to think like Jeff Bezos, even if you’re a two man startup, you’ve got to think about everything in terms of visuals and dashboards, because only then it becomes not an issue to 100 extra, right? Because if it’s an issue every time, for example, if you take on a client, and by virtue of taking on a client, you create a lot of cost and overload in your business.

Subconsciously, you will then avoid taking on more clients because you only associate more clients with hassle, work and heartache. So that’s a key part of it. And I feel that’s something I’ve learned in my later years. But in fairness, in the early days when I started as an entrepreneur in the 90s, we didn’t have that kind of data, but now we do it, which is great. You can build dashboards, you can use tools like Gecko board and Google Sheets. Works perfectly.

Yeah, I mean, I can definitely hear the passion in the way you’re telling these answers, right, and it shows that you’ve been in the trenches for a long period of time. Something like that is something that evolves from a person. It doesn’t just happen overnight. And I think in the last part of what you said, you’re talking about the period of time. Right. So as a listener to a podcast or listener to this show, I may be hearing him like, this guy’s great. He’s influencing me. I want to call him. I want to become a podcaster, and I want to become an overnight success. But in reality, how long have you been on this prosperous journey?

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. Well, let’s think about how long have I been in the business of storytelling? Probably about 20 years. So even if you think about telling your story, when one part of what I do, a lot of presentations, a lot of speaking, I do my podcast like yourself, I interview people. That has taken many years to practice. And it’s like steve. Jobs said it’s looking back, joining the dots, you only really understand later on when you can look at what you do and make sense of it. The reality is I graduated with an AI degree in 1995. Shows you how old I am. But artificial intelligence in 1095 was not what it is today. So today I’ll be like Google. I’ll be the Facebook guy. I would be taking any job that I wanted if I graduated now with that degree. But back then it was very different. So when I graduated with that, I didn’t have the kind of prospects that I thought that knowledge would bring me. So it’s been a 25 year journey of all these sort of very disparate events or chapters in my life. There was artificial intelligence.

Then I had a telecoms communications business, which we grew really successfully. Then I spent four years traveling the world. Then I started this podcast business. And you look at all of that and put it together and go, that doesn’t make sense. But the one thing I’ll say to your listeners is that one of the beauties of doing a podcast and guesting on podcasts, great podcasts like this one, or talking to people on podcasts or listening to podcasts is practicing your story. The more you practice, the more you refine it. And the more you refine it, the more you join the dots, because it doesn’t make sense until you keep telling that story. And I had this really good example of it which really inspired me. It’s from a completely different field. Kevin Hart so Kevin Hart said about his strategy, he has a very defined strategy for his comedy, which you don’t see, right? He just kind of looks like this fun guy who’s just like everybody’s friend type of thing. But what he does is this. He has a two year plan. And what he does is, for year one, he goes out and he gigs every single dive club out there.

The clubs are like ten guys and they’re drunk and throwing bottles and heckling and stuff. He’ll do them even though he’s like Kevin Hart and multi millionaire, right? He’ll go out and do all of those and he’ll do that for a year and face the brutal feedback. And that real sort of right in your face audience and read them and understand every time he does that joke, does it work? Feedback, get the data, iterate. And then what he’ll do is, year two, he’ll take all the best material from year one of practice, and he’ll go to the stadiums and he’ll do the DVD specials and so on, and the Netflix specials. So it’s a bit of a diversion, but the point is that that’s what I call agile storytelling. We talk about agile in business, like this lean iterative process. And I recommend it for all entrepreneurs because the more you go out there, the more you tell your story, the more you practice, the dots come together and you develop these like a comedian, you develop this scene, this skit, this brick that you’re building this wall with, right? And that’s that one brick.

So if you ask me about AI, I could tell you that story. If you asked me about Japan, I could tell you that story. If you ask me about Iron Man, I could tell you that story. And I believe this is how freestyle rappers were. I’m not a freestyle rapper. Wouldn’t even claim to be. But how do they go? And how do they develop these amazing bars and rhymes which seem to come out of nowhere? If you just give them a word and they’re away, right? It’s the same process. They’re kind of going down a maze mentally, and they can see where they’re going with these stories and joining the dots with it. And life is like that. Life is very much about how do you join the dots on this. But you only get to do that when you put yourself out there on stage, effectively face the moment of truth. So you asked me a short question. I gave you a very long answer. The point is years and years and putting it together, and it only comes together like a book. You never really understand it until you get to the last chapter.

Hopefully, this is not my last chapter, but the point is you need to get out there and get agile and face the moment of truth, and it starts to make a lot of sense.

That’s a phenomenal answer that not only tells your story, but you also give a very clear example of what Kevin Hart does. And to your point, on the agile side of things, it’s almost like a segmentation to where you have to target down. And the Kevin analogy that you made, he’s targeting down to the worst possible denominating audience, the audience that’s going to give him the most crap for whatever they don’t like him. So if he gets to do that audience that he knows for a fact that content would then appeal to the masses even more greater. And it shows. To your point, I remember when Kevin first started, Kevin was kind of like a blister. He was in all these random movies. He was always in the background. He would always be like this weird, quirky guy. And then all of a sudden, the overnight success happened. And then he was everywhere. And he was on every platform, on every media outlet, including podcasts, including television, Netflix Originals. So it kind of tells that he harnessed his craft to the point to where he could execute it and scale it. And I definitely appreciate you bringing that to the table.

I mean, it brings those pieces to the puzzle, like you were saying altogether to make this cohesive system that now.

I love that word craft as well. I think you nailed it with that. Yeah, people don’t see that. They don’t see the 10,000 hours that that guy put in because he was doing the graveyard shifts, right? The B movies.

Yeah, it was definitely just look at it from your tempo. Obviously you had AI, you traveled the world and I think it works, right? I mean, you started AI early enough to where now you could probably come into new AI platforms and be more effective because you understand the principles of AI. So that kind of goes to like your marketing, your strategy and your systems. In today’s world, you have a leg up on probably a lot of your competitors that they are still trying to even comprehend AI. So if time travel was possible, right, if you go back in time, anywhere in your past 25 years of this career to where you are right now, what’s one thing that you’d want to change? If you could do it all over.

Again so I can go back, change anything.

There’s one thing, period.

There are so many options. Where do you start? And I don’t know. I mean, I could give you the very cliched answer that, oh, well, I wouldn’t be here if all those things didn’t happen. But that said, there’s lots of things that I would like to do again or do better. You always have that in your mind. I don’t know. I don’t have a direct answer for that. I think one of the things I have learned, and maybe this is a long way around to the answer, is that when I started in business, so I started my first business in 1998. And at that time, really, there wasn’t a lot of resources to start a business back then. So our first ever business was a website design company. And we would go and knock on doors with travel agents and small businesses, high street businesses, and say to these guys like, do you want a website? And these days you can make money doing that. And I remember one company, they said to me that I don’t want any of this fancy stuff. And by the way, fancy stuff back in 1998 was like spinning gifts and like gray backgrounds.

They didn’t want to hear that. They said, look Brian, this is our brochure. Scan that. You’ve got one of those scanner things, that new technology. They take that, scan that, and that’s our website. And they paid us to scan like six pages of their brochure and put it directly on the website. And I was telling a friend about it, he goes, yeah, you can go out there and sell that, call it brochure where? And so we went out and knocked on the doors of these companies selling brochure. I mean, really, it was a sham, really. But that’s how it was back then. People were buying this stuff and I guess so if I could change anything, it would be this. I didn’t have any kind of advice I didn’t know how to run a business. Nobody in my family. We were like a working class family. The only people that had their own businesses around me were gas plumbers, and the manual workers or hairdressers. You didn’t have entrepreneurs or those kind of people who had access to capital. So I didn’t have the advice. I didn’t have the mentoring. I didn’t have somebody who could say to me, graham, don’t do that, or, you want to spend two years doing this thing.

If you do it this way, you can do it in two months. So I spent a lot of time and wasted a lot of money finding out myself. Now, I don’t know if that was a good thing in the long run, but if I could go back and change, it would be that, because the way isn’t it, you’re much wiser now. But back then, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. And it’s laughable, really, but I could save a lot of time if I had that kind of advice early on. And that’s why I say to anybody now, restarting business. Always good mentoring, good advice. Surround yourself with good people. Surround yourself with people who are better than you, who lift your A game. Right, but I don’t have any of that. And so it’s tough. Then you’re just kind of doing the random walk, trying to discover and bounce your way around to find answers. Right? That’s tough.

That’s a hell of a story. I’m envisioning you wearing, like, a T shirt that says, I used to sell.

Brochure wear, you know, the branding, man. I had to take some lessons from you. Right. I can see that.

Yeah, definitely. I just see it. Somebody would be like, I can see somebody totally accent you’re, kind of like a lead mag running up to you and be like, what the hell? What is that? And then you get to tell the story. You get to tell the story and lead them into your funnel. So I see. That definitely funny.

Oh, wow.

I think you alluded to something that’s important. You’re saying that you don’t come from an entrepreneurial background, but obviously your entrepreneurial savviness is profound, like, you figured it out to the point to where you are right now. So just opinion with the time traveling thing, look back and do you know or could you recall anyone in your life that was an entrepreneur? Maybe not in your inner circle, maybe in the secondary circle that you were looking out to, to be like, this guy’s interesting, or, this gal is interesting. Maybe I want to be in that space. Do you recall any of that happening throughout your life?

Not in my immediate circle. They weren’t those people. And I searched them out. I looked for them, but they just weren’t there. You go into your second cousins and your cousins, and nobody, and yet I remember picking up a book. I must have been in my early twenty s at the time. So after coming back from Japan the first time, going back to London, thinking I’m going to start a business, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I’m going to do something. And somebody told me they were mentioning a book. And I went to Borders in those days when they had bookshops. And I sat in Borders at the time and I was working at the time. I had a job as I came back to London selling pensions and life insurances on the phone. If you see that movie Boiler Room, it’s like that. I had a boss who said to me, you can make a hundred, you can make as many calls as you want, but if you make less than 120 a day, you’re not going home. It was like one of those businesses you had to list and you just phone, phone, phone like a machine.

It was so destroying. So I took off one afternoon and I sat in Borders and I read this book. And in this book I found all these stories, like really old fashioned entrepreneurs like Henry Ford and Onassis and Rockefeller, the real old school. Because this was 90, 98 before anything that we know as the sort of modern generation. I sat there and I thought, wow, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this. It was like somebody opened the door to a room that never existed in my life. You know, I was reasonably welleducated, but I never knew that there was this idea that you could change your life. And until that point I’d been living in this darkness, which was that I just did. Even though I had this kind of energy to I was unsatisfied with things that I had this understanding that I didn’t have this knowledge that there were people who could create things, the people that could make stuff and grow businesses. And that was revolutionary for me. These were my mentors. So what I read in books, I became passionate about books. I read everything. I read Tony Robbins and I read all these guys and absorbed them like crazy.

That became my education. So I think a lack of those people made me really hungry for this stuff. And that’s why even now, doing podcasts, I get to meet people like yourself. I get to learn people, different cultures, different backgrounds, and I’m just a sponge for it, right? And I’ve never stopped. And I would advise anybody to do that. If you don’t read, start a podcast, listen to podcasts, absorb the stories, because those will change you. Think about it. Even with the book, think about it. You can buy something for $15 that could change your life. How about that? I love reading, but I think more importantly, I love stories of the people who have done interesting things in their lives. That for me is priceless.

Listen to Gina. You’re a ball of passion, a ball of energy. And obviously, I think that you’re doing all this for a reason, and it has to be a why. So my next question is kind of like diving into your family a little bit. You have all these different factors and all these different things going on. Multiple podcasts, interviewing, and traveling. You traveled the world with your family for four years. So how do you currently juggle, like, your family life with your work life?

Not easily. Yeah, I admit that it’s tough. You make sacrifices, and you are very conscious of time slipping away. Right. So that is a big challenge, I think, for us entrepreneurs, the type A’s, they’re always rushing to the next point. We’re always unsatisfied, and it’s constant. It’s this noise inside this chatter inside your skull. It’s constant. And you’re constantly pushing and striving, and that’s an energy, which is a blessing and a curse because it’s a blessing because it’s the fire that drives you and inspires people and gets you off in the morning. And it’s a curse because you will see time fly by and you will not be able to stop and enjoy the moments. So it’s a real challenge for me. I admit it’s hard to turn off. There’s no off switch. It’s very difficult to have those moments where you can sit and enjoy. Where I live in Singapore, I can sit on the balcony, see the sunrise come up in the morning. It’s beautiful. It’s like, warm, it’s in your units. It’s like 80 degrees every day. And to sit and enjoy that sunrise every morning, but when I’m having my coffee in the mornings, like, right, what can I do today better?

So you have to kind of learn to detach, because that will affect family, that will affect relationships. And before you know it, well, I’m like, how old am I now? I’m maybe 50. So you can imagine. I remember being 1920, like, yesterday. You think, wow, that’s just gone in a blink of an eye, because you don’t want to spend your whole life rushing through. So I think that’s the challenge. I hadn’t found the answer. I can’t say I have the hack, but maybe that’s something I’ll learn in my older, older age. Like, just how to slow down and enjoy things. Right, but you always kind of feel that you’re building something. It’s endless. Yeah.

I mean, just listening to you speak, I think we have so many commonalities currently. Right now, I still own a web agency that’s a marketing agency. Kind of going back to your 98. Right. I’m also still, like, a licensed insurance agent that I’ve done maybe ten years within the last ten years, that I just keep the license active. So I’m just listening to your story, and I’m just like, Check, check, check. It’s like so many different.

What do you do to turn off? How do you just unplug? Because I find it near impossible. Do you get those moments where you just kind of Zen it’s like in like everything is kind of in place.

What I’ve learned is just kind of like I think for people like us to your point, like we may be a type personality where we’re always once we achieve something, that is just a micro of something bigger to achieve later on. So I’ve just kind of ingrained my family in that. My wife, she loves writing, but by daytime, her trade is she’s a treasurer. So I give her opportunity to kind of do copy editing and copywriting in my business. And like with the kids, every time I have opportunity to bring them to a convention or seminar or webinar or if I have a speaking engagement, I try to engulf them in that space because I want to influence them to understand how great entrepreneurism is. And there’s highs and lows, but it gives you the freedom to live the life as you see fit. So I kind of bring them into that situation. I don’t really separate the two. This kind of and then the off time, we may go have dinner, we may go bowling, but you better believe if I’m driving in the car, I’m going to put on an audiobook. Right. We may have a conversation about a strategy that something is a book I’m about to get ready to release in the next couple of weeks.

So they hear these conversations ongoing. So there’s really no separation between the two and mine.

Yeah, that’s spot on. That’s the way to do it. And bring them in because you could spend 20 years hustling and anything, what does Daddy do? And then they’re off. They’re gone to university, and you never really see them on those kind of terms again. Right? Yeah. But the fact they’ve experienced it and for them, that would be the best lesson. They’ve seen their dad hustle. And you’ve got a work ethic. Everything they learn in school will be secondary to those lessons that you teach them through how you behave and the values that you have and how you think about business and life and work and everything. They’ll pick that up. They’ll just observe it and the fact they were part of it as well. There’s going to be lessons for life.

Yeah, that’s the goal. So, I mean, listening to you speak, I would think that you’re structured in a sense. Obviously, you’ve done an ironman. And I have a cousin that she runs Iron Man right now, and just listening to her daily routine, her daily regimen, and she has to run 5 miles today, 5 miles in the afternoon. She has to eat this. So, like, what is your morning routine? Your morning habits look like?

Yeah, you got to be pretty structured. And I like structure. I like to have routines. I think I need routines because I need to book in my day, so I would get up in the morning. One of the things I do now is like juice in the morning because if I don’t do it, I’ll just get into bad habits. During the day, I started hitting the coffee and these kind of things. So I try to have my mini rituals that help me, because once work starts, once I’m at it, then it’s very difficult to say, right, time out, I’m going to take 2 hours off. It doesn’t work like that because I’m just like full into it. I’m in my world, I’m in the studio recording, working with clients. Bang, bang, bang. Something happens. It’s full on. So it’s very difficult during the day to structure that in the sense that I’m going to do at this time, this thing, this time, this thing. It’s very structured in the sense that I have goals, I have metrics that I work towards, even on the personal metrics. For example, these are the things that I want to achieve this week.

I’ll write, I have here in front of me, for those that can see on the video a very traditional paper bound book, right? And a pen. And in that you’ll see, for example, what I want to achieve day by day. I’m not microstructuring my day because that breaks. I think that that is something that I’ve tried, you know, down to 15 minutes, I’m going to do this and to do this, I’m going to do this. But over time, you resist, you push back and you break it. Now, what does work is having that sort of meta level structure. So these are the goals I’m working towards. This is what I want to achieve today. And even sometimes if I don’t do it, just writing it down as a good discipline to get it out of my head, to kind of speak back to myself. It’s like journaling. So these are the most important things for me, I feel that helps me keep grounded. And then on a daily basis, I’ll have my own metrics. So back to the ironman stuff. I’ll weigh myself every day at the same time and put it in the journal.

And if I work out, I’ll make a log with everything I do. I’ve tried to do that with eating, but that kind of fails. That breaks because I forget. But the most things that they can look at what I found, for example, if you’re tracking a weight, what tends to happen is you remember what you’re doing for this week. But four weeks ago, when you were getting results, what were you doing back then? I don’t know. You got to go back and look at the logs. So I’ll look at the logs and the logs will tell me, okay, that week I was doing short 15 minutes high interval training sessions. So that had an impact on my numbers, right? So I found logging and journaling, in that sense, works really well, and it goes back to the same in business, is that unless you can measure it, then you can’t manage it. So in that sense, those are my structures. That’s about as structures as I get. I’ve tried to go really micro, but my mindset doesn’t work on that.

Got you. So I think earlier in this podcast and kind of spinning off your journaling, you talked about reading, and this is like, one of my favorite questions that I asked because the answers that I get are so profound. And I take that information and I created a book club, and it’s called the Boss Uncaged Book Club. And the goal of that book club is essentially to help entrepreneurs read a book per week, training their mind to read a book for a week. So this next question I’m going to ask you, it’s a three part question. What books and I know that you’re very astute, and I can tell by the way you’re talking about, like, journaling, you’re talking about the books that you read earlier. What books helped you on your journey to get to where you are. What books are you reading now and what books have you authored?

Wow. I love that question. And I know with your book club as well as it’s Close to my heart and your heart, we’re very passionate about this. So let’s take that step by step. What books have I read that have helped me? There’s so many. I think maybe I would talk about the authors that I’m passionate about. So one of the authors, I’ve followed virtually everything he’s ever written, Seth Godin, because he’s a marketing author, but mainly aimed at small businesses. I think every small business and medium sized business owner should read it because it’s all about storytelling, everything from the Purple Cow to what have I written by him? This is marketing. So things like that, I’ve been fundamental in just shaping my ideas about, because he always used stories to impress points upon people in business. He didn’t talk about marketing. He told about somebody who made Wedgewood china, for example, teapots, which was just like, you always remember it. And that got me thinking about this idea that, wow, that is how you convey information and engage people. Tim Ferriss obviously, I mean, they’ve got yeah, I’ve read them more interesting. I don’t think his writing is very good, but his concepts are spot on. You could just look at the title of the book and then think, okay, I got the main message out of that. Malcolm Gladwell I think if I was to write on his kind of level, that would be for me, the peak achievement, because he’s an amazing writer. He writes very much in that sort of journalistic style. I was very much inspired by that, whether it’s Blink or what did I recently over here talking to strangers. That’s a great book, by the way. I really enjoyed that talking to Strangers is all about how we have difficulty reading people when we meet them, that we think we know people when we don’t really know them. And you can imagine, for example, how much of that problem is, like, with ID in police ID parades or judging people in court, for example, you think, he looks like a nice guy, he looks like an upstanding citizen. All those kind of misreadings and miscarriages of justice and so on. The news is all about those these days, right? But that really deep journalistic style was fascinated by I’m just looking behind me. Those are some great books that I read. There’s so many I’ve kind of got into people like Jocko Willink recently like extreme ownership. I really like that concept. He was the Navy Seal. I really like the idea of this idea of extreme ownership. Like take complete ownership of everything, even when it’s your people. Like if you’re a leader and your people screw up, you are responsibility, responsible for that. It’s quite inspiring. So I’ve kind of gone into that recent. But I’ve read so many books over the years and everything to the more spiritual stuff as well, but those are the more tangible ones. Now, what have I read recently? I’ve got into I don’t know if you’ve tried this, but I’ve just started over the last few weeks reading my books in audiobooks through Blinkist. I don’t need to try this. Basically, what Blinkist does is summarize books in twelve minutes in audio format. So I’ve been consuming a lot of books, and so I’ve been trying this out as a way to kind of how can I get inspired by all these books? But here’s the interesting thing, is that I’ve listened to all these books, but I haven’t remembered any of them. Isn’t that fascinating, isn’t it? That we think, oh, we can really, you know, shortcut the learning process here. But to me, it’s just like ear candy. It didn’t do anything. It just went straight through and it’s all gone. It’s just like background noise. So recently, in the last few weeks, I’ve been trying that, so I can’t actually report anything because I don’t remember anything that I’ve listened to on Blinkest. It’s just been kind of like radio playing in the background for me. But I think in terms of books that have been published recently, malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers is the best that I’ve read. Yeah. What about yourself? Can you tell me, what have you got on your book club and maybe you have something I’ve read from there.

Like I said, we have 52 books and the one that I keep rereading and I’m reading. To your point, I listen to audio books, and I’ve learned that if I speed up the audiobooks based upon the speaking recognition of the person that’s reciting the book, I can speed up anywhere from 1.5 to 2.0 and get that book down to three or 4. Hours really quickly. But I’m listening right now to Russell Bronson’s traffic secrets. And I can keep listening and relistening, and I’m really big on listening, taking action, listening, taking action. But every time I re listen to it, I’m just like, these principles are so simple and it’s kind of like everyone’s doing fragments of them. And he’s the first person that I see that kind of took all the puzzle pieces and put it together and made a clear outline, a clear todo, a clear takeaway, and a clear results of what you should be getting. So that’s one book that it came out in a book club maybe a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve listened to it at least. I’m on the fourth of the fifth time right now.

Traffic secrets. Click funnels, guys. Right?

Click funnel, guys. And funnels are just so simplistic when you really think about them. It’s kind of like, why are people just not doing them? It just makes sense. It just makes sense. The numbers don’t make sense at first, but when you think about his principle of a $10 book that really for free shipping, you break even on that free shipping of that book. And then the upsell of the funnel, whether you’re upselling into the audiobook, you’re upselling it to $100 course that’s going to help you execute the book. And then it’s a 299 Masterclass is going to help you build your funnels with traffic, you’re breaking even only on the first front end part of the funnel, and everything else after that is your profit. So it just makes sense.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think. Tim, I was reading must mean Tools of Titans or Tribe Mentors. I can’t remember which one because I do review all my books and go back through them. Tim Ferriss was saying that give everything away free and then sell the other stuff at premium. So you’re giving away or effectively very low price your book or your course, and then maybe you have your mentorship group and sell that for four figures. Right. So that’s the kind of stuff that these guys can teach us, right, because they know how to do that and build funnels around. Yeah, I’ll check that one out. That’s a great one.

Definitely. So since we’re talking about like click funnels, and especially as a platform, obviously as a podcaster, there are a million different platforms and software and automations and systems in place. So what software would you recommend that you use on a daily day basis that you wouldn’t be able to do.

What you do without as a podcast agency?

Yeah, obviously. I mean, it’s probably like a long list, but what’s the primary two or three that you would not be able to do what you’re doing, helping yourself and helping clients if you didn’t have access to this platform.

Okay, interesting. So there’s a couple. One is on the operational side, zapier nice. Which is an automation software. Are you familiar with that?

It’s the bloodline to a lot of companies today’s. Market.

Yeah. So you can really get into it. I think the usability of it is pretty poor, to be honest, I have to say. But to be clunky, but if you’re technical I’m quite technical, it works fine for me. The power of what you can do with that, if you can go beyond the very basic entry level Zaps. So basically, for those listening, zapier is an automation software. It connects the pipes of the Internet. So you can, for example, get an email, and from that email look up a spreadsheet, get details of somebody, and then send out another email back. And then that can connect with maybe another piece of software like ClickFunnels. Right. So you can have all these systems tied up. And then you can add in web hooks, for example, and make it a little bit more interesting. We can have different sequences, firing stuff. So Zambia, I think, is important for us because it allows us to do a lot of heavy lifting, right? So the best use of Zapier, you can do all the automation stuff, like they’re really bot like Zaps, but I don’t think that they’re scalable long term, because it’s a bit of a myth that you can create this automation, contact 10,000 people and get results.

What you can do is you can effectively take workflows you’re doing already. For example, you send this document to a client and then you update a piece of data in a sheet and then you send a reminder, a slack message to your colleague, all in one workflow. Those work really well. So that I think we cannot live without Zapier. And then on the podcast side, one tool which has really come of age is the script, which is actually semi editor, semi AI, machine learning translation. But the good part about the machine learning translation is, of course you can transcribe your podcast. The transcriptions aren’t very good. Like machine learning transcriptions about 90% to 93% accurate, but seven or 8% inaccuracy is actually a lot of work. It means you might as well just do it yourself if you’ve got to go through and check everything. So like all ML translations, transcription, sorry, descriptive is reasonably accurate, but not accurate enough. But what the beauty of descriptive is that you can transcribe your podcast but not use it for transcription. You could use the transcription as effectively your timestamps. You could look through cut content. So I know that a bit where Graham says this, I can see it visually instead of a waveform, I can see he’s talking about this part, and then I can cut exactly that and move it around.

And I feel that that’s the future of podcast editing because it allows you to tighten up and create more narrative style podcasts. You could do voiceovers a lot easier and you can mix a natural podcast around. So I think that that tool is still in its infancy. But in time that is going to become a game changer for a lot of people because it turns your visual wave audio, like whether you use Audacity or audition podcast into something where you can actually see meaning in words. And that is really exciting because it speeds the whole process up. So there’s a couple off the bat I recommend, and I think both of.

Those that you recommended, they both pull into your AI background just a little bit, like understanding the artificial intelligence side and utilizing these platforms to execute the systems. And like you said, you’re not talking about one layer zaps, you’re talking about multi zaps to do this and do that. If then do this, then do that. And it becomes a trained reaction of things that happen that way you don’t have to put yourself or somebody else’s manpower to execute those particular things. So I definitely see that AI side of you coming out.

Let’s not forget Google Sheets. Yeah, good old spreadsheets that these are really underutilized that if you know, for example, how to use not so much on the apps script side of Google Sheets, but for example, if you know, like really powerful formula to use inside Google Sheets, for example, you can do queries that’s something I’ve learned in the last few years. Like you can take data from one sheet and spit it out on another sheet with a query, which actually filters everything as if it was an SQL query. Getting a bit technical. But basically it means that you can share one sheet with somebody else, which filters everything, so they don’t get access to changing the sheet or data you don’t want them to get access to. To me, that’s very powerful. You can share that with a client, you can share it with a teammate. Or if you’ve got like everybody seems to have today, outsourced freelancers, let’s say outsourced freelancers, building a list for you of upwork. You want them to share one piece of data, but you don’t want to access everything else. So you could do that through Google Sheets using functions which exist now.

Queries. So, you know, looking to those rather than buying like really fancy software, there’s a lot of potential in that.

Yeah, definitely. I like that you brought that up too, because that’s one of the things that we utilize, like for creating emails, obviously form inputs, this variable data. And then what we’ll do is we’ll compile these different columns and create an email and they will end up with like 100 emails and different sequences based upon the input values that came in from forms. So when you brought that up, I was just kind of like, yes sir.

Yeah, it’s the way to do it, right? Because you could do this manually. But here’s one thing I’ve learned about being a successful entrepreneur. One of the most important commodities that we have is decisions. And it’s the energy we use in decisions. And I mentioned Barack Obama again, but he comes up once more and he said that every morning when he was a president, he used to have two boiled eggs for breakfast. And somebody joked with him about it, journalists, and said, Where’s the originality in that? He said, look, every day I make thousands of decisions. And one of those decisions is, do I press the red button or not? What you don’t want is me wasting my decision energy on what am I going to have for breakfast. So you see that with, like, Mark Zuckerberg wearing the same hoodie every day. And so to your point about those emails, every single email that you have to do manually is a decision. I had to make a decision about what I’m going to write or what is the URL I’m going to open to find the content. You want to take all of that away because if you’re using up your decision energy and decision fatigue is real, if you’re using up your decision energy on these small inconsequential things, then by midday, just after lunchtime, you haven’t got anything left.

You’re like dead.

You’re right about that.

That’s why we automate, is to save that. And that is most important thing for an entrepreneur, right?

So I’m going to final words of wisdom. And I think every other episode I’ve always asked for the general public or I’ve painted an avatar, and in this case, I’m going to be the user case, right? And I’m going to ask you, okay, I have a podcast, Boss Uncaged, and what words of wisdom would you give me? And I’m at that growth stage to where I have more content than I’m delivering. And what that looks like is like right now I’m on episode 50, but I’ve recorded 100 episodes, so I’m backlog by 50 episodes. What words of wisdom would you give me to utilize that content or to be more effective to getting the additional 50 episodes out a lot quicker?

Okay, so you’ve got 50 out, you got 50 in the can, and then what’s the problem that you’re facing? What’s the challenge?

I don’t necessarily think it’s a challenge. Sometimes I do three or four episodes a day, right? So I’m not going to release three, four episodes the next day. So by default, they’re stacking up. So what I’ve learned is that as I’m interviewing people, I’m giving them access to the content, like what we did with you. You wanted to record it so that you have access to market it. But then I’m going to have to schedule this episode, and this episode is going to be scheduled at 105, and I’m only releasing one episode per week, or to say two episodes per week. There’s still going to be a period of time before the additional episodes are going to hear.

Okay? And so the problem is that you’ve got all this content months down the road before it comes out. Is that a problem though?

Not for me. It’s not for me.

No.

For the guests, I see it as, okay, I have enough content to kind of create a legacy, to be able to create videos and vignettes and audio tidbits and transcriptions and books, all on the content that I’m developing. And it’s good content. But for the guests, potentially, I’m looking at their investment. They invest in an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, and then they may have to wait four or five months before this year. So that’s why I’m delivering them the content, saying, hey, you could take it, you could market, do whatever you want with it. And then here’s the set, here date. So then you get two marketing strategies. You get your marketing strategy and then we follow up with our official launch later on.

Yeah. Well, is it a problem for the guests, though? That’s the question. Some of them, yeah, some of them. Okay, so why would it be a problem for them? Do they feel disappointed that they don’t have it out straight away? Well, I think it’s more so excited about getting out. What’s the deal?

I think it’s more so the promotion. So let’s say, for example, if I have a new book and you’re promoting it using my podcast is one of many podcasts, and that book, I released it four months down the road. You may be on your second book by then.

Yeah. Okay. So you give them the video that they can use and remarket for their own purpose. So that would be I would incentivise the guests to do that on their own volition. If you give them as a follow up, you can automate that as well. Right. You could send them a link to dropbox here’s the Raw MP3 file, the Raw video file. You go and do what you want with it. So that would be problem solved because I think a lot of it I mean, me personally, it doesn’t bother me that we have to wait a few months for this episode. For me, one of the best things is I get to speak to you and I know this will come out in time. If it’s time sensitive for a guest, though, that may be the best option is to say, right, here’s the automation. Get your assistance to send a follow up email. They can go and download it, and if they’re really motivated to do it, they’ll then go and use that content for their own use. Right. Which I think is probably the most important thing for them, that they have content, that they have some content that they can share with their network.

So if, for example, I’ll take this video from today, I’ll snip it myself and share it with my network. Okay. Because that is me talking to my network. And then when it gets published on your audience, when it gets published on your podcast, your audience is going to see it. Right? So I don’t see a problem for me personally, so maybe I’ve misread that. But if that was, I would say maybe the issue is that not necessarily that you’ve got all these it’s fantastic to have 50 front loaded into your podcast. You’ve got the pump primed for the next three or four months, right?

Yeah, that doesn’t do that.

That seems to be a nice problem to have. And the problem I think most podcasters face now is audience growth. That’s a different matter, right? And so the question would be increasing your cadence of the podcast, that would also reduce your publishing backlog, would that also increase audience growth? It may do, it may not. So it’s really what your objectives are with the podcast. If your objectives are to meet people, to talk to them, have a steady stream of content, then you’re winning, right? Don’t fix it. It ain’t broke.

Totally. I get that in that, right. This is a spin off on that question. Let’s say I’m a new podcaster, right? And like, my problem, obviously, I’m becoming more and more seasoned the more I do this, it’s like a muscle, right? But if I have a new podcaster coming out, what words of insight would you give to a new podcast? Or stepping into this space, what insight would you give to them?

Well, firstly, any new podcast needs to define your audience. Avatar this is an exercise to go through whether you’re an individual podcaster or you’re a corporate, because brands will start from that position that we mentioned earlier. This is what I want to talk about, and many entrepreneurs do this as well, because for them, it’s a starting point. And yes, that’s fine, you can start like that because it gets you in the game, and in many ways you have to get on the bike and start pedaling before you can turn it, right? That’s the way it is with podcasts, you’ve just got to get started, but you have to define the audience. Avatar and if you were to listen to radio now, radio is 100 years old, right? Radio has been around since the golden age of audio. The first one, which is the 1920s, and now this is the second, 100 years later. But it’s lasted 100 years, because if you speak to any radio professional, if you speak to a host or a producer who’s been in the game long enough to tell you this, that the one thing that radio presenters do that podcast hosts don’t do, is they speak to their audience.

And when you listen to radio, it’s like he’s speaking to you. And interestingly, radio presenters never say you guys or the audience, they always say you. So you at home, you listening, they’re speaking to you directly. And I find podcasters tend to not do that. They tend to speak to a very vague group of people and not even think about those people. So once you define your audience avatar, many things fall into place. For example, what are they interested in, what are their pain points? What are their problems and frustrations? So if I’m a startup founder, or a small business owner or an entrepreneur, why do I listen to Boss Uncaged? It’s because of you and what I feel. You’ll solve the problem for me that I’m facing the frustrations that I have. So that’s the questions we need to think about what are the problems, what’s the language that they use and what’s on top of their mind, what’s bugging them at the moment they have these concerns, you need to speak to those. So you may have on this one hand your key talking points, which is, these are the things I want to talk about.

And on the other hand, you have the audience avatar, which is, this is what they are currently responsive to. And then there’s this integration. On the one hand, your messaging, on the other hand, the keywords that you need to push for them to respond to that. So now it’s a case of integrating the two. And that’s really where you’re mapping. So you go from audience avatar. That’s the first step. These are the people I’m speaking to, to the second point, mapping what I want to talk about to what they understand. So do they understand the terminology that you talk about? Because quite often audience aren’t operating at that sort of speed, right? So now people know about podcasts, so I can talk to them about podcasts, but if I talk to them about the digital transformation of communication, it’s like they’re not interested. It’s BS to them, right? But that’s the kind of speed that I’m operating at in my own mind, right? So it’s an important part, that definition. So short answer to your question is start with the audience and then build it around then. And then think about how do you involve them in your programming?

I don’t literally mean phoning. Those days are gone. It’s possible, but there are many other ways. Build an audience around them, talk to them, get their questions, get their feedback, do the readers mailbag, all that stuff. That’s how you grow a podcast long term, because I put it to everybody listening. Now, if you’re interested in starting a podcast, you’ll find like episode five, episode six, the motivation starts to dip a little bit, the novelty wears off, and then you’re realizing, why am I doing this? And then that’s where people fade and the numbers bear up as well. When it comes to the pod, fade is about episode five, episode six. So you got to think about longterm community growth. How are you building a community? And that’s exactly what Radio does. Think about radio phonics mailbags. And the host would always go out into the community and do the phone the show from the hospital ward or whatever. That’s how they did radio and that’s how we should be thinking about doing podcasts today. Wow.

I think that’s definitely why I’ve called you the podcast boss, to start off right.

I’m proud of that. That’s what I’ve arrived.

Well, you definitely lived up to that title, which I knew you would. Just by looking at your background and listen until you speak on other episodes, I knew that you were going to be able to fill in those blanks. So my next question is how can people get in contact with you? What profiles are you on? Like, what’s your website address?

Yeah, I mean, if you’re interested in Podcast Maps the easiest place. So if you’re interested in podcast, go to Podcast Maps. I’m ahead of myself there. I do a podcast called Podcast Maps. So it’s podcastmaps.com, which is a map for podcast. It’s a guide about what’s happening in podcast and where we’re going. So it’s forward looking. So if you’re interested in the bigger stories, the bigger picture of our podcast, go there. That also links to my personal website. You can go check me out there and the agency stuff as well. But that’s the best starting point. It’s the you are here map guide that you see in podcasting.

Nice. So I got a bonus question for you. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone, dead or alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours outside of your family, who would it be and why?

Wow. I have many choices.

What’s the story? We want to go from there.

Let me see. Robert Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy, yeah, he’s a personal hero of Mine. Not the early Bobby Kennedy, but the later one who was a lot more reflective after his brother’s death because he was a fantastic storyteller and his mission as well. I mean, he was one of the first politicians across racial divides in America, right. Even though he came from a privileged white family, his popularity with African Americans was huge because he was out there shaking their hands when no other politician would do it. Right. And so him personally, his brother is obviously the one everybody knows about. Mine was the King, I think is possibly one of the best storytellers of 20th century and a true hero in every sense in the terms of what he stood for, what he sacrificed and the change that he made and totally selfless as well. I think people like him, they’re once in a century they come around. So I think we can have a good conversation, three of us on the podcast. Then the people like, there are ones from history like Gandhi, I would love to have time with for the same reason, just fascinated by them, these people.

And then you were throwing writers and poets and all kinds of historical figures would just be fascinating. It would be endless. I would like to put in that roundtable podcast oscar Wilde, the author, and then some musicians as well. I put in like, Hendrix, Steve Jobs. Yeah. And Bob Marley for sure would be, I think, an interesting conversation over dinner. Yeah, it’d be good. I’m sure that would be an interesting podcast for everybody to tune in. So that would be my idea of if I died and went to heaven and they had like a recording studio where he said on the microphone, those would be the guys that I would sit with and just hang out and would have a beer and a chat. So how’s it going? And it’ll be just open ended conversation. Yeah, I can totally see it.

I mean, you painted a visual and I want to audience to kind of stop and really think about that. It’s kind of like the nights of the round table, right? And he has a musician, he has riders, he has politicians, and he’s sitting there being able to have this conversation with like, legends of our time. That’s definitely a hell of a picture to paint.

Yeah. At top of the charts. Podcast. That one for sure.

Nice. So going into closing, man, I think you’d ask some great questions, but I always give an opportunity near the end of my podcast and give the microphones to my guests to ask me any off the script question that you would like.

Okay. So I know you’re a big fan of unfair advantages and systems. What’s your unfair advantage as far as.

Like, for Boss Uncaged?

Yeah, you tell me.

I think my unique factor and unfair advantage in Boss Uncaged is that I’ve lived as an entrepreneur in multiple different disciplines and I figured out how to talk to people like yourself and wear multiple hats. Like, in this conversation, I’m switching between my multiple different disciplines and I’m having an opportunity to talk to you mono Imano on the same accord. So if I’m talking to a scientist, I love science, so I’ll bring up things in that science language that allows me to relate to that person. If I’m talking to a doctor, I’m going to be able to relate because I worked in the medical field for a particular time in my career, insurance, for example, rock climbing. So it’s just being I lived a life that gives me the opportunity to have multiple different conversations on, like, terms that makes it easy for a listener to comprehend because I’m trying to figure out who you are, you’re trying to figure out who I am, and then we’re both telling this mesh story that just becomes like, a masterpiece.

I have a follow up question. May I? The rock climbing, I’m fascinated by it. What would you need to be like to be successful at rock climbing? What does successful rock climbers know that mortals don’t know?

I would think rock climbing is this thing that we call beta. And beta essentially is just information. So you may look at a particular person climbing the rock. And they may look effortless, right? They may make it look easy. And then you try and you fall on the first hole. Now a part of that is building up grip strength and building up upper body strength, but it’s not 100% that it’s more so technique. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. It’s like playing chess with a rock. And so you have to kind of think through the process. So the key in rock climbing is acting for that beta. It’s seeing someone else do it without effort and accidentally in the crux. The hardest part of that climb, what did you do that I’m not seeing? And it may be something as simple as, oh, I lean back with my left arm versus holding with my right arm. Something as simple as that makes that transition more fluid to when you’re reaching with your left hand. Then you would reach up with your right hand versus going from your right to your left. And that makes all the difference in the climb.

And the next you’re topping out. You’re doing that climb like it was easy and then someone else was going to come back to you like, how the hell did you do that? So the step and repeat, you become the coach and you’re like, oh, you just do this. You reach your left versus your right and the beta just continues down the progression of the next climber to the next climber.

Wow. And do you get it to that flow state where you’re making those moves and you’re not thinking or you’re very conscious at the time of that where you’re going to put every single grip?

I think it’s a hybrid, so it’s different styles of climbing. Like I’m more of a boulder. I like without ropes, I like 20, 30ft maximum height. If I fall, I land on a pad. So it kind of gives you the freedom to not have any abundance of anything harnessing you down and you can kind of climb and figure things out. And then when you let go, you’re like, okay, you have to be willing to commit to the fall or willing to commit to topping off that rock versus a top rope climber. Obviously a rope can snap and it will be the end of your life. If you’re climbing something that’s like yosemite or something like that, right? But in that, that’s 100% endurance, you’re climbing to that magnitude of that height. It’s endurance. It’s just building up to that step and repeat. Step, repeat. Much like business, it’s 100% staying on the treadmill and you keep running. You keep running and eventually you’ll find little tricks of the trade on how to duck underneath the wind, right? Or if you breathe through your nose versus breathe through your mouth, just little things like that, that you tweak and adjust.

And as you do it more effectively, you become more proficient.

I love it. I love the. Idea of the mastery. It’s very challenging. It’s addictive, isn’t it? Literally, you are climbing as well. But there’s also the mental climbing of getting better and never, ever knowing enough.

Yeah. Especially with sailing. Sailing is one of those things. Like, I went for two sales this week, and it was just I went with a guy that I would view as a master sailor. He’s been sailing for, like, 2030 years of his life. And even when we’re on his boat, he’s kind of like he is still learning. Think about the courses in sailing. And even the guy that’s the captain of the ship, he’s been sailing for 40 years of his life, but there’s still nuances and new things that you could potentially learn. And that’s why I like it, because even when you become great at it, it’s like you’re never going to be the greatest. You’re always going to have to keep learning and achieving and overcoming the new obstacles as they present themselves.

Yeah. Fascinating. I love it when you speak to somebody who has a craft and is learning something which is technically very challenging. You can just get off and listen to them talk about it, even if you’re not interested in yourself. It’s just, like, fascinating, the whole idea. You can see the parallels between that and so many different things, like so many disciplines, that the actual base level of all of it is the same. That challenge that we take on. And it’s a challenge, isn’t it? More than anything that we do it for, as opposed to the actual activity, the actual activity becomes the manifestation of that. Right?

Yeah, definitely. I think you’re nailing it, and I think it’s a particular type of personality because on one side of the coin, there’s a genre of people that are compounded by fear, and instead of resisting the fear, they dive into the fear and they’re like, I’m good. I’m going to stay in my safe zone. And then you have the other side of the coin is kind of like, if fear is not part of the equation, then why am I even living? I’m not pushing my limits. I need to push my limits to grow.

Yeah. Great. Myself.

I definitely appreciate everything that you brought to the table today, Graham. I think you definitely took it to a high level. We talked about your journey, and I think just your journey in itself should be like a study of what life should be. And I definitely appreciate you bringing that to my audience today.

Well, and you were the boss host today. You did a great job. You asked great questions.

I definitely appreciate it. Well, I look forward to following you. Like, you just talking about, like, the mapping podcast. I mean, I definitely want to kind of get into that. And I think this is the dawn of a fruitful relationship between I think we have so many common accords and so many alikenesses. And even though that you’re over in Singapore, I mean, it’s only a breath away.

Yeah, man, it’s good.

All right, S.A Grant, over and out.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of Boss Uncaged. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming an uncaged trailblazer. Don’t forget to subscribe rate, review and share the podcast. If this podcast has helped you or you have any additional questions, reach out and let me know. Email me at ask at SA Grant.com or drop me your thoughts via call or text at 762233boss. That’s 762-233-2677. I would love to hear from you. Remember, to become a Boss Uncaged, you have to release your inner beasts. Signing off.

Listeners of Boss Uncaged are invited to download a free copy of our host SA Grant’s insightful ebook, Become an Uncaged Trailblazer. Learn how to release your primal success in 15 minutes a day. Download now at www.bossuncaged.com/ freebook.