Victoria:Today in PowerTips  Unscripted, we’re going to talk to John Corcoran, and he’s going to share with us his concepts of how to make podcasts one of your most valuable marketing tactics. If you’re thinking of starting a podcast for your business. Well, it is one of the best reasons to gain notoriety and establish value for your community of clients.
 
Victoria:But starting a podcast doesn’t mean it will bring success all on its own. Today, John’s going to share with us tips and tactics for how to make this work for you. And we’re going to hear all about it in just a minute.
 
Victoria:Wouldn’t you be better off just. Hi, I’m Victoria Downing and welcome to PowerTips  Unscripted where we talk about tips, tactics and techniques to help you build a strong, profitable remodeling company. And today, I’m not here with my co-host Mark Harari because he couldn’t be available today. So I’m on my own and excited to work with all of you.
 
Victoria:Today we’re going to be welcoming John Corcoran. He’s the founder of Rise 25, a company whose mission it is to make the world a smaller place by creating connections, helping to connect more companies with their ideal prospects and referral partners. John is a recovering attorney, a writer, father of four, and a former Clinton White House writer. He is the author of three books about relationship building and client acquisition and has written for Forbes, entrepreneur, Business Insider, Lifehacker, The San Francisco Chronicle, and basically anywhere else that let him.
 
Victoria:He, like Remodelers advantage, believes in the power of connections. And we’re delighted to have him. Welcome, John.
 
John:Victoria. Thanks for having me.
 
Victoria:Sure. Hey, it’s great to talk to you because we love podcasts, obviously, and we think it’s a great tool. But what about Remodelers? Should Remodelers have a podcast as part of their marketing program?
 
John:I think it’s a great question. And, you know, I’ve been doing a podcast for about 11 years now. I started when I was practicing law, and I just started by interviewing my clients, and for 11 years I’ve been telling everyone who listened that they should start a podcast because, you know, even if you don’t get a tremendous audience, you don’t get huge numbers of downloads.
 
John:You’re not at the top of the charts. It brings such tremendous value to your life. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You get to have great conversations with interesting people and ask them questions that you’re curious about. And then at the same time, there’s all these additional ancillary benefits because you’re building relationships. It will lead to referrals. It will it will generate content that you can put on your website.
 
John:You know, today’s modern economy really depends on content. That’s how people are finding remodelers and that’s how they’re finding vendors and contractors that they hire. So yeah, there’s tremendous value to it. And I say to everyone that they should really think about it because it’s just such a great tool for uplevel in your network, building your network, connecting with great people, generating content, all those advantages.
 
Victoria:So what if you aren’t somebody who likes to talk like we do? You know what? If you mean, what if you’re intimidated by the concept? Or if it’s. Sounds so hard, is it?
 
John:Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people are intimidated by the idea that they think it’s more complicated than it needs to be, but at its core, it’s just about having a conversation with someone. And if you’re in business, you’re having conversations all the time. You’re talking to potential clients, you’re talking to referral partners, you’re talking to, you know, strategic partners, that sort of thing.
 
John:Or you should be anyways. You should be doing these sorts of things. And and so this just gives you a venue to do it. If you can have a one on one conversation over zoom with someone else with who hasn’t done that in the last year and a half, really, then you can do a podcast because you shouldn’t be the one anyways.
 
John:Who’s spending time forwarding RSS feeds or uploading audio files? That’s not the stuff that you should be focused on. You should be focused on using the podcast as a tool to have great relationships and build great relationships.
 
Victoria:So let’s talk about lead qualification or lead generation in general. Everybody wants more qualified leads, but it seems harder and harder to generate them. Right now I’m hearing from our, we have a membership of Remodelers, across the country in the US and Canada. And what I’m hearing right now from a lot of them is the lead quantity is picking up, but the quality is dropping.
 
Victoria:What are some typical mistakes people make when they’re trying to generate quality leads?
 
John:Well, first of all, I wouldn’t you know, nothing is a magic wand, right? I wouldn’t expect that. It’s suddenly going to turn into a spigot of of a high, highly qualified leads. And if you approach it that way, people are probably going to see right through it, or they’re going to think that you’re just trying to use them.
 
John:So, you know, you should be using it to build great long term relationships, not just with new people, but also with existing people. You’ve probably got long term, high value clients or strategic partners or or referral partners who refer to stream of clients to you. Those are great places to start, you know, and when you when you do that, when you approach it that way, you realize that you’re going to get greater value out of it, right?
 
John:Rather than just thinking of it in terms of this is how I’m going to generate the lead. But having said that, if you do want to qualify people, it’s a great tool for qualifying people. We’ve had a number of clients, you know, for example, we had a we had a business, a client who was a business coach. And he said very clearly to us, I only want as a client, I want clients that are CEOs of companies that are generating over $100 million a year in revenue and have 250 and above employees.
 
John:Right. That’s pretty specific right here. And in spite of that, we guided him. We helped him. He reached out. The funny thing is, a week later, he’s on the phone with that, a woman who was a CEO of a company, and she was giving him names of people in her network that met those parameters. And the funny thing is, she said to him, you know, it’s too bad.
 
John:I guess I’m not a good fit for your podcast. This is a brand new podcast, right? You know, it’s not like he was getting huge number downloads or anything like that. And he said, oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. And she said, yeah, we only have 55 employees and we only or something like 110 employees and 55 million in revenue, at which point he backtracked and he said, oh no, I’m so sorry.
 
John:Actually, I would love to have you as a guest on the podcast. But what I love about that is he was doing this velvet roach velvet rope approach where you just decide the parameters of who I’m going to let inside this, you know, the rope and, and when you do that, you and you generate and you approach it the right way.
 
John:You will get qualified people, qualified people who will come and be a guest on your podcast.
 
Victoria:So talk to me a little bit about finding guests. Okay. So the whole the whole concept that you’re talking about is interviewing people, talking to people, having discussions with people, which we all do all the time. So how do you suggest that people go about finding guests to be on their podcast and, you know, tie that in for me?
 
John:Well, everyone loves to think and talk about shiny and new and how do I meet new people and how do I go out there, run Facebook ads and get new people? Speaking of new people coming into me. But the truth is, we’ve all got strong relationships. Previously that that we bring to the table, and that’s really a better place to start because there’s are people that already know, like and trust you.
 
John:They’re already people that maybe they’ve been a champion of yours all along. They’ve referred people to you. That’s a great place to start. And when you start with those people, maybe, maybe they’re a good fit to feature on the podcast. Maybe not. But you can also ask them to who else should I be featuring? Here’s the clear parameters of the types of people that I would like to include.
 
John:You know, on, on, on the show. And you can get recommendations. And again, think in terms of referral partners, strategic partners, not just the end clientele, but rather the other professionals, maybe other vendors you work with, maybe other contractors that you work with. When you think about it that way, that could lead to a referral partner who’s not just send you one potential client per year or one time.
 
John:Maybe they’re sending you five referrals a year or ten referrals a year. And so it actually can be a lot better use of your time when you focus on the referral partners rather than just the end lead end client.
 
Victoria:So as a remodeler, you want the homeowner to be hiring you, right? That’s the end audience. But so all the referral partners you’re talking about could be the countertop people, the appliance people, the interior decorator, all those, you know, lighting things.
 
John:I mean, they can let me make it super simple. Let’s say you’re a remodeler in Akron, Ohio. You’ve been doing it for ten, 15 years. You’ve got this network of other people that you work with, some who are big champions of yours interior designers, decorators. You mentioned architects, contractors, countertop people that you work with. How valuable would it be for you if you carved out 30 45 minutes of your week?
 
John:You can probably squeeze that in, right? That probably wouldn’t break the bank, but squeeze in that amount of time and you have a great conversation with that person. You do it over zoom, you record it. It’s super simple, but you’re also delivering value to that person. You’re you’re you’re expressing interest in that person. You’re asking them about their career, their background, their history, how they built their business.
 
John:And then you record it and you publish it, and you make that person feel like a million bucks because how often does that happen to them where someone’s interested in having a conversation, focus 100% on them. Their spouse is sick of their stories. Anyone else doesn’t hear them anymore, right? Their friends have heard them all before. Yeah, when you do that, and this is what I experienced when I was practicing law, and I started with interviewing my clients and I, and then I radiated out from there.
 
John:I started interviewing local businesses and my local community, and then I got started getting introductions to bigger people. I started interviewing authors and things like that. It just ends up you will generate referrals for yourself no matter what you do, whether you whether you screw it up or not. Hopefully you won’t screw it up, but there are ways you can definitely maximize it.
 
Victoria:So I mean, think about a really small business. Right now, our people range from probably 800,000 to 20 million, right? As an owner of the business they’re selling, they’re doing so many things that we’re in so many hats doesn’t have to be the owner that does the podcast. Could it be someone else in the company?
 
John:It doesn’t have to be. But I’m in the cases and we have clients that fall in that range as well, some much very like we work with the Berkshire Hathaway Company, and we always look at some larger companies and we work with smaller companies. But here’s the thing. When you are an owner like that, you know that you wear all these different hats and you have so many different things you need to do on your plate.
 
John:And yet when you do a podcast, it actually it’s like a Swiss Army knife. It’s actually your your time is going further because you’re you’re generating content, you’re having great conversations, you’re up leveling your network. It might lead to more referrals. It is a business development activity. It will produce SEO when, if ever does 45 minutes of your time cover that many different things.
 
John:So for many business owners and again, we’re working with really large business owners in many cases, once they start to see the potential of it, they realize that this is really high leverage use of my time. This is really good use of my time. And then the end of, you know, carving out, making it a priority.
 
Victoria:Okay. But a lot of these business owners, well, they might have 30, 45 minutes to carve out to interview someone doesn’t know anything about literally producing a podcast. I’m looking at you on zoom right now, and I’m talking to you with my computer audio. I see you got the fancy, microphone on and that sort of thing there.
 
Victoria:What? The owners of these businesses aren’t going to have time to research it and figure that all out. How do they go about doing that whole side of things?
 
John:Yeah, it’s a great question. And when I got started, I outsource some pieces of it. But I was really the bottleneck. And I had a couple of different contractors that were handling different pieces for me, like editing the audio, doing the show notes, that kind of thing. But I was stuck in the middle of it all, and it wasn’t until I realized that I need to get that off of my plate, and I that’s really not the highest and best use of my time, that I started to have a bigger impact.
 
John:One year at the end of the year, I’d only put out seven episodes, even though I intended it to be a weekly podcast. And my current business partner, Jeremy and I had just become business partners. Our business was focused on something else at the time, but I came to him because he had been podcasting even longer than me.
 
John:I came to, I said, you gotta help me with this. I got to figure out how to streamline this, or else I’m going to give it up. And he helped me to streamline it. And the very next year I put out 52 episodes, one per week, and I probably spent less time on it and I got much more massive results.
 
John:So what I will say is, if you have a profitable business, you should not be spending time on those things. You should hire someone to handle those pieces because your time is much better spent leveraging the podcast. Using it as a tool to have great conversations. And that is not replaceable. Although caveat we do have some clients who they will bring in other hosts, and so they’ll be a host for certain types of of interviews.
 
John:And then other team members will be host for other types of episodes. It really depends. It depends on the person.
 
Victoria:Well, it’s a little bit.
 
John:Exactly the end of generating more content. And you know, oftentimes the business owner will focus their time and energy on those relationships that are most high leverage or the relationships that they hold most closely. And so, you know, the ones who are long standing referral partners, those are the people that they will focus their energy on.
 
Victoria:All right. That makes a lot of sense to me. So if you’re saying go out and find somebody, hire somebody, who do you look for? What is the terminology that you would even use to find someone to handle all the technical stuff?
 
John:Yeah. You know, I mean, we’ve been doing this for a number of years now. And I should point out before I had any vested interest in helping companies to do this, I told I said the same thing. So, you know, I didn’t have any bias at all. And I said, you should outsource each of other companies. And it’s becoming more crowded.
 
John:There are more companies that are coming in there. What you want to ask about is one how much experience do they have in this space? You want to make sure that you use a company that’s been doing it for some time and not just jumped into the space because they were building websites last week, and now they’re putting together a podcast.
 
John:And secondly, you want to make sure that that company or whoever you work with is going to be responsible and going to be thoughtful and actually thinking about the strategy around getting ROI, getting more referrals, getting more strategic partnerships, and getting more clients out of it. Because the mistake that I see as I see a lot of people who start a podcast and maybe they outsource it, they hire an agency to come in to help them produce it.
 
John:Six months later, 12 months later, they produced 100 episodes. They haven’t gotten a single client out of it, no ROI whatsoever. And they’re very frustrated and they give up and they go try something else. So you want to make sure you’re thinking about how I’m going to generate money from this from the beginning, and I’m not talking about running some ad for for GoDaddy at the beginning, which is going to get you five bucks if you’re lucky.
 
John:I’m talking about using the podcast again to uplevel your network, get clients, get referrals, get strategic partnerships.
 
Victoria:So I’m one of the things I want to do here. To leverage you a little bit, John, is to start on the lightning round. That sounds good to you. Let’s do.
 
John:It. Let’s do it. And now here’s the Remodelers advantage lightning round. It’s a dry.
 
Victoria:Okay. Let’s put 60s on the clock. What’s your favorite business book and why?
 
John:Give and take by Adam Grant is I don’t know, it’s my favorite but definitely one of the best out there. And it will teach you about why you should be a giver.
 
Victoria:If you were not a consultant to companies across the country on podcasts and marketing, what do you think you’d be.
 
John:Doing? I would be an astronaut on the International Space Station and, waiting for my ticket to Mars.
 
Victoria:All right. What are you not very good at?
 
John:Well, I’m a I’m a I am a lawyer. That’s my background. So therefore I suck at math.
 
Victoria:Okay, great. Your room, your desk for your car. Which do you claim first?
 
John:Oh, man. Probably my car, because I can outsource it. I could take it somewhere to be clean.
 
Victoria:Yeah, in one word, describe your high school self.
 
John:Confused. Confused?
 
Victoria:Oh, that’s a good one. What’s the last show you watched on TV?
 
John:This is gonna be embarrassing. Bridgerton, I guess.
 
Victoria:Oh, I guess that was while ago. Was. So. Yeah, I don’t watch much TV, I guess. Thank you so much. Just a really interesting and helpful and I, I really love the idea of our members doing and our listeners doing podcast because now but one last question about that little off out of sync sequence here. Isn’t the field so filled up with podcasts that there’s no room for any new ones?
 
John:It’s a great question. And to that I say, first of all, no one’s going to ever do it as uniquely as you are. You are unique, and therefore you’re not going to do it the same way as anyone else. And secondly, it’s actually easier now than ever to start a podcast, in part because people know what it is.
 
John:When I started 11 years ago, people didn’t know what a podcast was. Now they do. Yeah. And also everyone’s familiar with zoom, so it’s easy to hop on zoom with people, that’s for sure. Easy. And and also, who cares if other people are doing it because you’re going to build great relationships with great people, and that’s the only thing that matters.
 
John:And when you do that, it will yield more referrals. It will yield more clients, it will yield more strategic partnerships. And that’s really what matters.
 
Victoria:All right. All right. Oh thank you so much. Now before I let you go, though, I want you to share with our listening audience your five words of wisdom and why they resonate with you.
 
John:Okay. Depends on we count how we count each of these words, but I think it might be six. So be giving without expectation of return. And most of.
 
Victoria:All.
 
John:Relates to give and take and read the book. It will it’ll help you explain why, but that I think that also encompasses what we do through podcasts is is being giving to others, and it will lead to great results for you.
 
Victoria:All right. Great. Well, thank you so much, John. We appreciate it. Now if people want to learn more about rise 25 or you where would they go?
 
John:Sure. Yeah, they can go to rise 25 Medium.com or email us at. Support of rise 25 media.com. Happy to answer any questions, guys. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m active there and say that you heard me being interviewed by Victoria, and then I’ll know where you came from.
 
Victoria:All right. Great. Thank you so much John. I appreciate spend the time for you. And I hope lots of our listeners are going to start podcast now.
 
John:Me too, I hope so. Great. Thanks, Victoria.
 
Victoria:Thank you. So that was really interesting. It would have been fun to have Mark here to talk to you about this, because he is the marketing guy. But you know, I love doing this podcast and we’ve got a lot of great results from it. And it’s pretty amazing how many people listen to podcasts these days. So if you’re thinking about a new marketing tactic or a new way to reach out to your audience, or a new way to bond those relationships with trade contractors and suppliers, this could be a fantastic way for you to go hire somebody for the technical side.
 
Victoria:Make that easy. You sit down at the conversation with somebody, somebody who’s who’s in the industry, who’s interesting and lively, and this can be a really awesome way for you to increase your quality leads coming in the door. Thank you again for being here week in and week out. We appreciate it greatly. Please recommend our PowerTips  Unscripted podcast to others that you know, and we look forward to talking to you again next week.
 
Victoria:I’m Victoria Downing goodbye from PowerTips  Unscripted.