I’ve Been Coaching Podcasters for 5 Years But Was Afraid to Start a Podcast

Well, hello. This is Joel here at East Coast Studio, the owner of East Coast Studio, and welcome to the starting point for our podcast. This is the introduction episode. This will call it episode zero or whatever, whatever it needs to be called. This is the first full length episode. Although it’s not an interview, this is going to be a solo one. We are going to be alternating back and forth as the podcast progresses. It’s not going to be all one or the other. So today we’re going to be covering why we are finally starting a podcast at East Coast Studio after all these years of helping others make podcasts, our journey of working with a business consultant to tweak and optimize our business, to better meet our goals and serve our clients.

Being intimidated by starting something new, and what you can expect to learn from this podcast as we move forward. You’ve probably faced this challenge, at least I expect. I am going to say I’m just not going to try anymore for this episode. Okay, I gave up trying to prepare. I try to say on the light side of perfectionism, but if you ask anybody, I know they probably say they’ll probably tell you I’m a hardcore perfectionist. So I really tried to just stop preparing for this episode and just dive into it, just do it and see what happens. I’ve already noticed that I’ve made a couple of stumbles in the introduction that I didn’t want to make, and typically I probably would have just started the whole thing over. But this is really a learning experience for me to not do that. Let’s just plow through it. So we’re just going to get into it. We’re here, we have a podcast finally.

So to tell you briefly about the journey to this point, let me back up a bit till a little over a year ago. We started working with a business consultant. This was somebody that I happened to run into at a networking event and we hit it off and realized that we needed help with a lot of the things that this consultant specialized in. So to back up even further well, with the business, we’ve been around for about five years now as a company officially. Previous to that it was just me solo for one or two years, and I’m an audio guy. My background professionally is in audio engineering. That’s what I know, that’s what I’d like to do. You can call me an audio nerd. I don’t really know a whole lot about business, maybe a little more than the average person I mean at this point I do know more, but back five years ago not really a whole lot, I just like working with audio and happened to fall into podcasting.

I think at a lucky time when the industry was taking off, I was there. Things were going well with, I would say, little effort on the business and marketing side. You know I was working hard and putting out great results for clients. When it came to the actual work, but in terms of having to go out and find new clients, that whole thing really wasn’t something we had to do. So I think we got pretty lucky there.

But as the years went on and leading up to where I met this consultant, things were okay, kind of plateaued. We had rapid growth originally and then kind of just evened out and it’s not the end of the world, depending on your goals, but for us at that point I envisioned us getting bigger. We had the systems in place, we developed a business that could handle more work. We had everything sorted out in that regard. So why can’t we get more? And I think that’s probably common amongst a lot of entrepreneurs is well, how do I get more freedom? How do I get more money? Why just stop? And one of the biggest fears that I had was okay, maybe this is fine, but if I don’t know how to get through this plateau and grow the business, then I definitely also don’t know how to rescue the business if revenue start to go Down, and that’s a really bad thing. If you become accustomed to a certain amount of revenue, you’re paying your staff. You don’t want the business to go downhill and not be able to save it. And that’s when it really became a reality for me that, okay, it’s time to take this seriously and try to figure some things out.

So happened to coincide with the time that I met that business consultant and we started working on a lot of things in the back end and marketing would come second to that. But, as he taught me, there was a lot that we needed to sort out first. I would say one of the biggest things there was just identifying who our ideal clients were before anything else. Not even getting to the idea of going out and finding them and communicating with them and having an offer for them, but, number one, just figuring out who they were, because up until that point we had kind of been one of those businesses where you’re just taking money from whoever will give it to you. We did have some standards that we put in place over the years, like projects we really didn’t want to take on, but otherwise it was just whoever came along, and we ended up in this situation where we have a website that wasn’t really converting and the consultant gave us all sorts of insight on that. It’s like, well, it’s not speaking to anybody, so your ideal clients might come across this website, but to them you’re just another podcast editor, so they don’t care. So we had a lot of work and thinking to do in that regard, but we got through that and then came the point where myself and the consultant kind of said, okay, well, I think this has been a great year of development. We did a lot of work in the back end to develop a great offer and put systems in place and make things more efficient. Now we’re really ready. We know who we want to talk to. How do we go find those people? Big question for a lot of business owners how do I go find my clients, my ideal clients? So marketing that was the next step and we’ve dabbled in this over the years in terms of spending money on ads or trying blogs and trying some cold outreach Things.

Admittedly, I never really either kept out long enough to see results fully or second tracked properly to even know did this work or not. Or if, say, things are going okay but then the leads and conversions kind of die off, how come, why was that? I don’t have an answer for that. So, shifting into that marketing side of things, I’ve worked with various people over the years, whether it’s marketers who I just didn’t really feel like they knew they were giving me sound advice. Or we would hire some other people like that could be a person to review the website or optimize the website, copywriters, things like that and I would get different pieces of advice from all of them. One would say something was bad and the other would say the exact same thing was good. And I’m just so frustrated at that thinking how do I know the truth? Who do I actually pay to get some results here?

So through some other connections and networking, I happened to meet a great person. Her name is Trina, she’s a marketer, runs a successful agency, and I finally talked to her one day and said Trina, what do I have to do here? I don’t want to think about this anymore. I’m an audio guy. I would like to just grow the business. Who do I have to talk to? What do we have to do to just make this grow? Please help. Is it you? Is it someone else? What do we have to do here? And one of the first things she said to me was well, why don’t you make a podcast? And I thought you know what. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.

Because, working with the consultants, one of the things we developed was talking to entrepreneurs who have podcasts and they’re trying to use those podcasts to generate profits, to generate leads, which is very common amongst the people that we work with. And I realized by what Trina told me well, if we’re encouraging people to do this and we kind of know the ins and outs of how to do that with a podcast why aren’t we doing it? If we believe so much in this whole medium and being able to podcast and go out and address your ideal client and attract them and get leads through this, we should be doing it, we should be the experts in it, we should have a podcast. It just made so much sense and I was almost shocked that I never thought of it before. Maybe it came up once or twice in the past, but it wasn’t something I was really comfortable doing, didn’t really want to go down that path. So maybe this was just came the right time. But, in any event, what Trina told me about starting a podcast, that really made a lot of sense. So I thought, yeah, we should be doing that.

Not only that, there are various benefits to podcasting beyond just money, and maybe it can all lead to money at some point, but not everybody starts it with that in mind. There’s a huge networking component to it as well an authority within your space. So one other thing, as I mentioned briefly, we had been experimenting with a bit of cold outreach by email, and I know that works. Maybe it’s not so efficient in some ways, but I thought, you know, I’d be getting so much more of a conversion rate in getting a connection and talking to these people if I had a podcast to invite them onto. That’s not to say that I would go out and do it with the sole intention of earning money, but if I’m blowing so much time researching leads and trying to find these perfect people to reach out to and see if they could use our help, which honestly didn’t make a whole lot of sense because we offer a service that these podcasters already had.

Most likely They’ve been podcasting successfully for a year or two. They probably have production processes at an editor in place, so why the heck am I gonna go talk to them? Just, there’s a very low chance they’re gonna respond to me. However, if I wanted to talk to these same people about being on a podcast that we had and give them an opportunity to share about themselves and promote themselves and have a conversation, well, I think there’s a higher chance, higher likelihood, that they would be responsive and I would actually get to talk to them and connect with them and all the other things that go with that recording a podcast episode, get promoted on their social media, et cetera. So, again, not my entire motive just to demonetize that relationship, but if you wanna have any chance at connecting with these people at all, well, just sending them what I consider to be basically a spam email hello, we wanna sell you something. I think there’s a lot better of a chance of it working if you have a podcast to invite them on to. Of course, you’re not gonna end up working with all these people, but it just made a lot more sense to try and foster relationships that way, not to mention various other benefits of podcasting. So this all made a whole lot of sense, okay.

Now, of course, I had plenty of hesitations, despite being a guy that works and has worked with hundreds and hundreds of podcasts over the years, helping them sound great, put a great product out into the world, understanding how to communicate with audiences and monetizing things like that. Just because they have that knowledge doesn’t mean that I’m just gonna go out tomorrow and start a perfect podcast and everything’s gonna be great, or that I’m not hesitant or nervous about it, or I’m not intimidated by starting something like this. Right, and I’ve talked with lots of people over the years with those exact concerns, and I’ve seen whatever one else is built as well, and it makes me wish I should have started sooner. Why didn’t I start sooner Now?

I was listening to an episode the other day by my friend, joe Casabona, who’s also a client and a podcast coach, and he was speaking with Crystal Prophet. Not only is she a genius within podcasting and marketing, but Joe has been doing this for so long. He’s got some really cool automations perfected and just the systems and processes he’s put in place for how he runs his podcast and they’re talking about how he separates his episodes into, I believe, three different acts and they set up a problem and then they resolve it. And I’m just thinking, what am I gonna do here? This guy and many others out there have just been doing this for so long. They’ve got this perfected why I shouldn’t even bother starting this. And I know from talking to so many podcasters over the years. Everybody has that same thought why start? Not everybody? Some just yeah, they dive in and they know this is gonna be an uphill battle and I’m gonna do it. But it’s very common to feel exactly like I was just. There’s already guys out there talking about this same stuff. Who cares? What’s gonna make me stand out? Why bother?

And so when I hear something like Joe’s podcast and hearing how he’s managed to develop his episodes and I’m kind of I’m steering in my episode outline, thinking how I don’t even know what to write here and this is it’s not perfect, right, and I know what’s good. I’ve been coaching people on this stuff for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that without practice and doing it regularly, you’re just gonna come out of the gate with perfection. There are so many little details, and I don’t know about you, but myself I love getting caught up in those details. I’ve said these exact words to people over the years that you have analysis, paralysis. Okay, stop asking me all these little questions about these dumb little details that don’t matter. Go and do something. Go put an episode out there. You’ve been talking to me for two months here about what microphone to buy. It’s irrelevant. Okay, go book a guest and do an episode and then we’ll work on it.

So, despite having told that to people so many times, I get caught up in the exact same thing and I feel like I need to have this perfect. I need to cover every base before we do anything. I’m trying to set up some air table sheets to manage my guests and people I’m gonna contact and episode scheduling and things like that, and I feel like I have to take in every bit of knowledge out there in order to perfect that before I do it. Because what if I go and contact someone and I don’t have my system 100% perfected? It just it doesn’t matter. It matters to some extent, but not as much as we think. Just get something going. I’m personally obsessed with finding the most efficient and effective way of doing things. So I really need to let go of that, which is going back to the beginning of this episode, where I said I’m trying to tell myself just go, do not pick this episode apart, don’t continue to prepare for it for five hours and restart recording it a hundred times.

So here we are, and if you started a podcast, you probably had a similar thought to me too. It was just on just another guy with a podcast. Like, if I can’t be a Joe Rogan or my friend Joe that I mentioned, or any of these people that have been doing it for a while, why, why even start? But the thing is that you got to start somewhere and you can be that person. Give it one or two years from now. You’ll be that much further along. There is, say, if I had started one or two years ago, well, I would be that far into it now and you could be that person if you started now, or if you’ve already started, then that’s great. But looking at the other people that have started and being envious of them or feeling hopeless like I might as well not even start. You know, these guys have been doing it for two years and I didn’t even start while they all started from the exact same place. So here we are, and there are all kinds of roadblocks, there’s there’s time shortages. There’s an unlimited amount of things to do every day.

I’ve been trying to get this podcast off the ground for a while. This idea was conceived in late 2023, but life gets in the way, it’s moving to a new place. I’m here the acoustics aren’t the greatest, but I’m telling myself too bad, and I finally have this moment to really dig in here and look everything over and say, okay, this is where we’re going to start. We’re going to perfect it as we go. It’s not going to be perfect out of the gate, but we’re going to start. So get in there, record an episode, send some emails out to book guests. You’ve got a basic system in place to book these people. Just do it and we’ll figure it out along the way.

Because there are so many little details, it’s impossible to have this attitude like I had and feeling like I need to perfect every little thing before we can even start. It’s just not possible. The only way to do it is to start and learn as you go, no matter how much you try to plan and prepare and develop the perfect system. Once you actually hit the road with it it’s not going to be as perfect as you thought. You’re going to want to tweak it and improve it, so you might as well just get going Like.

A great example for me is kind of what I’m alluding to here is the guest outreach stuff and the episode scheduling. Even though I’m immersed in podcasting, I haven’t had my own. I never really had to deal with this, except a bit of hair save from clients, a bit of reading here and there. So I’m trying to automate all this air table stuff with Zapier and oh, I can’t do it. It’s just not perfect yet. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. So just get the basics up and running and learn as you go.

And another concern that I’ve had on my mind too for me I’m not this, I’m not a corporate guy, but I see a lot of others doing in content out there A lot of times to me just doesn’t seem authentic. Not that I necessarily have perfected being 100% authentic. Yet, despite knowing it and wishing to be, to present myself in a manner that is authentic, I think we’re conditioned throughout life to not act that way. So it’s definitely a challenge to kind of peel those layers off and be your true self and resonate with people. I was listening to some content from Dan Kennedy. He speaks about this and just really putting yourself out there and being you and resonating with the audience. That’s well. Ideally, you’re your perfect audience, but that’s a whole other thing is how do I make sure I’m doing that? So that’s another reason to be apprehensive about starting. But you just got to do it and kind of on that note, I was working in a webinar and sent it out to a handful of clients for some feedback and I thought I’d done a pretty good job.

I made some notes, but I was trying to sound natural and talk just like I’d be talking to you right now, not scripted. And one of the first pieces of feedback that I got from one of my clients was Joel, don’t read from a script. It sounds like you’re reading from a script and I thought I had this perfectly developed webinar. I’d rehearsed it. I thought it sounded natural. First thing I get back yeah, it sounds scripted. Okay, back to the drawing board.

So nothing is easy, nothing is like. Nothing is easy, cheap, done for you tomorrow in terms of marketing or growing a business. It all seems daunting, it all takes time. You might as well just start. So, as I’ve admitted, I’ve put this off. Things have come up, there have been excuses, gotten away, but yeah, you, just you have to start somewhere. It’s the only way you’re ever going to be one of these people who’s one, two, three, five years in is if you start now. You can look at them and say, well, there’s no point. And by putting yourself out there, while you may face rejection, there may be haters on the internet. That’s just part of the deal. You got to get past that and I guess I’m kind of telling myself that here as well. You know our own clients.

So we started doing some newsletter type stuff at one point and I’d be in there and I’d see, oh, someone unsubscribed. And that would bother me, because to me we get bombarded with emails every day. I get them in my inbox and I don’t think twice about it. But whenever I would write up a East Coast studio newsletter, I’d have my finger on the send button. I’d be nervous. Oh, here we go About to bother everybody. I had to make everybody angry and to see our newsletter show up in their inbox and want to delete it. But you just got to do it. If you are just going to sit in confinement and not put yourself out there not saying anything to anyone, I think you’re really doing your business a disservice.

I also thought well, hey, what if a client hears this and thinks and I’m a jerk because I’ve been hiding behind the emails for so long, we don’t really communicate a whole lot? How do I say something in a podcast? And they think I don’t like that guy anymore? I hope they don’t, but at the end of the day, you got to put yourself out there. Some people might not like it, some people will. And yes, obviously I am considering how do I do this in a way that is appealing to the right type of client that we want? What if I’m talking and it’s not appealing to those people? Well, that’s a problem, but it will tweak it over time.

But, like I said, with all the details that surround starting something like this, it’s impossible to cover every base and perfect it from the get go. Part of the process is just doing it and learning and evolving it over time. I cannot perfect it without starting. So, yeah, maybe I will do this. Maybe some people will not like it, maybe the clients that we want will hear this and be turned off by it. I don’t know, but the only way to know is to start Sitting and thinking about it. Forever doesn’t do anything, and that’s definitely one of the major reasons why it’s taken us this long to get a podcast off the ground.

Even in this specific episode, I could have spent five hours more preparing this, putting the thoughts in order, but, like I said at the beginning, no, no, we’re not going to do that. I could go and listen to it after and try to insert parts. I’m sure this probably sounded like a scatterbrain episode I knew that going in but I told myself we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to do that, just get an episode done, record it. And I find that in real life, for me, I can’t shut up. You cannot shut me up. I’ll talk and talk and talk.

But when I was doing some run-throughs for some of this podcasting stuff, I turned on the mic and just freeze. I don’t know what to say, which is a whole other thing in terms of how the brain works and being comfortable, because typically, if you are alone with your friends, your family, or you’re really comfortable with people who are around you, you’re not afraid to say anything. But when you get in a situation whether it’s social or trying to record a podcast or something your brain shuts off and it’s just not giving you anything. That’s a sign that you are not comfortable, and how are you going to be authentic in those moments? How are we really going to let our true selves shine through if you’re seeing this evidence that you’re not comfortable? You’re not able to do that. So here we are. That’s the introduction episode.

That’s why East Coast Studio is finally getting around to publishing a podcast, and I’m excited. It’s good to have an outlet to share some of the great work that our clients have been doing. As I mentioned, networking with some new clients. I certainly hope we are able to generate some business through it and also give value back to the other people who we’ll have on our podcast and a variety of other things. I think podcasting obviously is a great medium for a variety of reasons, so I’m excited to be involved and kind of be there in the trenches with our own clients, not just giving them advice based on what I’ve learned and understand from working with them, but doing our own podcast now as well. So thanks a lot for tuning in. I hope you’ll subscribe. We’ll talk to you soon, thank you.