Why is podcast interviewing the next gold rush? Because the best way to sell is not to sell something. But to earn respect, awareness, and trust of your customers. Aaron Civitarese’s guest is Thomas Schwab, the Chief Evangelist Officer of Interview Valet. Tom sits with Aaron about how the customers have the answer. Connect with them and learn as much as you can! After all, the richness of your life is the richness of your relationships. Do you want to get new leads? Be a guest! Do you want to nurture current leads? Be a host! Either way, podcast interviewing is the next gold rush. Tune in!
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Why Podcast Interviewing Is The Next Gold Rush With Tom Schwab
This is Episode 51. Interview Valet is helping brands, businesses, and inspiring thought leaders reach their ideal customers with Tom Schwab.
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I’m sitting down with Tom Schwab, the Chief Evangelist Officer at Interview Valet. I am excited about this interview. Tom, welcome to the show.
Aaron, I am thrilled to be here.
Thanks for taking the time. I love what you are doing. I’m very excited to talk about this with you because this is perfect. I’m looking forward to it. Before we jump in too far, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I proved that you could do podcasts from anywhere. I’m in Kalamazoo, Michigan, halfway between Chicago and Detroit. It exists. I graduated from the United States Naval Academy. My first job out of college was running nuclear power plants. I have done the corporate job and entrepreneurship. My biggest thing is there are a lot of problems in the world nowadays but there is no better time to be alive. With the tools and opportunities that we have, I have to remind and pinch myself that this is a great time to be alive.
Several years ago, the presidents of countries, kings, and queens of nations didn’t have what we have now as far as technology, connectivity, networking abilities, and information at our fingertips. It’s the best time to be alive. This is a testament to podcasting, networking, and meeting people all around the world. No matter where you are or what you are doing, you can connect with people. That’s what we are doing here now.
Tom, podcasting is right up my alley. I’m talking about this all day with you. I’m excited to pick your brains but let’s take it back little ways. I don’t think your entrepreneurial career started with podcasting. Take us back into your earlier years a little bit of background about Tom. What piqued your interest to go down that road?
To me, podcasts are the flavor of the day. In 1920, the radio was called the wireless telegraph. It wasn’t until 1930 that the radio was. If somebody is going to read this in 2030, and laugh and go, they are still calling it a podcast. It’s conversations and connections. The richness of your life is the richest of your relationships. I grew up in the Midwest, a suburb of Chicago. My life was small. I would have never been more than 100 miles from any place. While it was nice, it was small. Once I went into the Navy, my world expanded to different ideas.
I still remember moving back to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and getting offered the job. On a snowy February day, I told them, “I will take the job but I’m not dying in this place.” I didn’t want to be insulated again. With all of our connections now, you can have that anywhere. Throughout my entire life, I have liked to meet people, be exposed to new ideas, and connect with people. To this day, my mom doesn’t understand what I do. I wrote and gave her the book. She read it and says, “Honey, I still don’t understand what you do but I’m proud of you.”
With the tools and opportunities we have, it’s a great time to be alive.
I’m like, “Mom, I introduced people that should know each other. That’s the mission of our company, Interview Valet, to personally introduce inspiring thought leaders to millions of individuals they could serve for the betterment of all.” Nowhere in there does it say podcast. It’s all about introducing people and ideas. I told my mom that, and she smiled. I’m sure she’s still telling all of her friends that I’m an engineer because that’s easier to understand. My epitaph, if they described me through what I did my entire life, I’m a connector. I like connecting people.
With technology nowadays, connecting has never been easier. The old Six Degrees of Separation, what do you think about that in the new age?
We’ve got a client of ours who’s a cybersecurity analyst. He shared with me the new number is 3.2 degrees of separation. They used it to solve crimes because of your 3.2 degrees of separation from any victim or any perpetrator. I look at that and say, “If you are isolated or ignorant, it’s largely by choice.” There are some people in certain parts of the world that are not as blessed as we are but for most of the first world, you can connect with anybody and learn anything. You don’t even have to live in Cambridge to take courses at Harvard. Go online there. The courses are there.
Everything is at our fingertips now. There’s no excuse. You can’t even come up with an excuse because it’s in your phone. I get extremely excited when I hear that because that’s something I always think about. It’s like, “You are so close to everybody. You can introduce this person to that person.” All of a sudden, you have a connection to someone that you would never think you even get close to. All of the sudden, you are in the Zoom conference call with the same faces on the screen.
It happens to me all the time these days. I’m like, “What’s happening? Look who’s here. It’s crazy.” I was chatting with my mom at my family home where I grew up. I was chatting with her about a person. I was like, “Look at this person here.” I was pointing at it, and I explained to who it was. I said, “There’s no way years ago, you could be in a meeting with these people. You have to go to the conference room to be in the company and C-Suite, get in there and talk.”
Instead, we are all sitting around virtually having a meeting, talking about mindset and smashing limiting beliefs. These are multimillion-dollar CEOs sitting at home, having a conversation. I love the fact that we can do this now. The world is expanding at an exponential rate because of it. It’s guys like you, and companies like yourself are helping add fuel to that.
When you think about it, everybody on that call is saying the same thing. It’s like, “What’s ordinary to you is amazing to other people.” We do a lot of podcasts book tours. When somebody has a book that comes out, the new author, instead of going to every Barnes & Noble will go on 1 or 2 dozen podcasts interviews, months before the book comes out. There have been times where I want to do a screen share and share it with people like, “This is what I did now.” We did a book tour for a Hall of Fame Major League Baseball player. I’m on a call with him and his wife, and they are at their home.
Another one is Eric Weinheimer, the first blind man to summit Mount Everest. He was on Time Magazine. We did his book tour. It’s like anybody else on a Zoom call. Especially the challenges we go through now, we realize that we’ve got more in common than we’ve got different. Everybody is at home and trying to call from their home or quiet place. It brings us together a lot more where we don’t all have studios that we work out of.
I’m seeing that very clearly these days. Everybody’s authenticity is shining through, and people become more vulnerable, even if they don’t want to be. Usually, the person who’s very prim, proper, and shiny in their studio, all of a sudden, now is at home with the kid crying in the background but it brings their audience closer to them because they are more relatable. The people who are using this to their advantage now are gaining leaps and bounds as far as taking market share if you want to go down that road.
It is because their audience is becoming more in tune with them as a person. In the future, when the world gets back to normal after this COVID is over and business as usual starts up again, the people who were putting themselves out there being vulnerable and showing their real side, their client and customer base is going to be that much more attracted to them.
This is the power of podcasting or whatever you want to call it in the future. This is the power of communication and networking. This is the whole thing. As you are building your business here and connecting people, Interview Valet has a very cool business model. I have a lot of questions about the monetization side of it and how you help people build actual businesses through it.
Let’s talk a little bit about yourself first as the Chief Evangelical Officer of this beautiful company. When you were coming up with it and developing the business, what was your overall vision? What was the motivation behind this? I know you love connecting people but what was the main purpose of the actual business itself? How did you come about that?
I had built up an eCommerce business and sold it off. We had done it through inbound marketing using content to attract, engage, and delight. The hack that we used several years ago was guest blogging. Instead of blogging on my own site and having three people read it, I will put the blog up on where other people are, tapping into other people’s platforms. I built that business up and sold it off.
I was in my sabbatical phase. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew I did not want to build an agency. I had this thought, “I wonder if you could use podcast interviews much like we used to use guest blogs.” I was in a mastermind group with some guys down in Nashville. They asked, “Could you help me with my digital marketing?” I’m like, “I’ve got time. I will do that.”
We started to test this, and I was shocked. We saw conversion rates of visitors to leads that were 25 times better than we saw in blogs. At first, I’m like, “It’s got to be a personality and a niche.” I kept testing it, and it worked well. More people asked me about it. I put together this cheesy PDF book that I kept giving away. Somebody said, “You should put a video course together on this.” I’m like, “I can do that.”
It’s sold well but I never took it out of beta. After about two months, I shut it down because what people told me was that, “You gave me the cookbook and videos but I don’t want to be the chef. I want you to do it and let me be the guest.” I didn’t want to sell a course that people were not getting results out of it. It’s kicking and screaming. I’m like, “We will test it to see if it works out.”
In the fall of 2015, we beta tested it. By the spring of 2016, I was even amazed. It’s like, “This works.” It’s working for authors, coaches, and brands. I was having fun with it. We launched the business. We have grown to 18 team members serving about 100 clients. It’s like raising a child. You do everything. Now, it has grown to the point where I’ve got a great leadership team and people that know and do their jobs better than I ever would. My role is to give them some leadership, set the directions, go out there and evangelize for the company, our customers and podcasting.
You took your past experience and kept going with what you knew best. That’s an important lesson. On a side note, you double down on what you knew the market was craving and what you were good at.
You can connect with anybody and learn anything.
I always say that I’m not the smartest person in the world. If you ask a business owner about their business, they’ve got an opinion. You can hire a consultant, and they have an opinion too but it’s the customers that have the answer. It was the customers who were telling me what they loved and loathed. I had this great idea in my mind of what it was supposed to be.
I found out that they didn’t want a video course or a book. They wanted me to do the done for you service. If you want to call it a Forrest Gump smart, that’s what I bet. If I hear the answers enough times, I will recognize them. That’s what we have been doing, following what our customers and podcasters have asked for.
That begs the question, what are they asking for? What’s the market looking for out there?
It’s more and more interesting stories. It’s not the big-name people with the talking points but give me somebody interesting. Somebody that’s got something that’s timely to talk about but also timeless. Someone that can talk about their scars, what they have learned, not necessarily their wounds, and get some perspective on that. The other thing too is that for all of us, what’s ordinary to you is amazing to others.
Help them share that and love their expertise, and both the host and the guests are saying, “Make it easy.” Staples had the best one with the easy button. Everybody wants the easy button. For the podcast hosts, they are saying, “We like working with Interview Valet because you make it easy to say yes to one of our guests.” They show up on time and are prepared with professional equipment.
The host gets sent beforehand a brief sheet on them, a bio, all the artwork, and everything like that, so they could have a great conversation, even the same thing for our guests. They are like, “Make it easy for me to get in front of the right podcast. There are a million podcasts now. Find the ones for me that make a difference. Prepare me for the interview.” Only kids and clowns like surprises.
None of our clients are that. We prepare them for each interview, so they know who the host, guest, and audience are, what they talk about, and all their social media links. Is the video going to be on or not? We take care of all of those details so that both the hosts and the guests can show up and have a great conversation.
It’s completely true. You come into my world as the show host. It’s funny not having my own office. I had little headphones go on and everything but the show must go on as they say. If the content is valuable, at the end of the day, authenticity wins. It is what it is. That’s the way I see it. It’s also very important for both sides of the coin to be professional in this manner, be on time, understand who each other are, and all that.
Kudos to you and your team because our relationship from the beginning, our email correspondence back and forth with your assistants and everything, was extremely clear, crisp, and concise, which was very nice, and honestly, refreshing as a podcast host to receive that information upfront. I can completely resonate with what you are saying. That makes complete sense.
I can understand why your services are in such high demand. It is turning readers into leads and customers. It’s not like we are always here to sell something to somebody. It’s about bringing value and everything. The way you impact is by sharing your experiences with people and generally exchanging money for them. Let’s talk a little bit about that. How do you help your clients monetize their passionate podcast experience?
A lot of times, I will have people say, “Do you get paid to talk on a podcast?” I’m like, “If you don’t get paid anywhere to talk, you are doing something wrong,” whether or not it’s a stage or a podcast. By getting paid, I always say, “Are you helping people?” There’s a great book out there by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. I’m not Jewish but I love the book. He talks about money being certificates of appreciation.
If you are serving people, they give you money. We always tell our clients that your goal of being on a podcast is to give value. There’s a great quote out there by Rand Fishkin from Moz in the Seattle area. He said, “The best way to sell something is not to sell anything but to earn respect, awareness, and trust of those who might buy.”
That’s what you are doing on a podcast interview. You are earning respect, awareness, and trust from those who might buy. If you do a good job, you don’t have to promote yourself. The host wrote you better than you ever do. There are three types of people that hear me on a podcast interview. The first ones are the ones that say, “Tom is an idiot.” I’m like, “That’s fine with me.” If that’s what they believe, God loves them. I know we won’t work well together but I hope they get something out of it.
The other ones are like, “That was interesting but I don’t see how I could use podcast guesting but I could forward this on to somebody else.” It is fine. The ones you want to have a conversation with are the ones that have the problem and the people you work with. The ones that say, “That was interesting. Interview Valet works with people like me. They had had success with people like me. Tom is a little quirky but I like him. I want to work with him.” Those are the people you want to connect with. That’s where monetization comes into. Exposure brings opportunity, which can look different in so many ways. It can be sales, JV partnerships, backlinks that come from podcast interviews or social media following, depending on what’s most important to the guest.
It’s endless. Bringing value is the key because, at the end of the day, people learn through stories and also want to learn something. The keyword is learning. Learning and entertainment are what they are here for. What would you say to a podcaster who’s not a podcaster yet or a networker, communicator person who’s like, “I would like to put myself out there and love to communicate with people? I wish I had a platform.” What would you tell that person who might be lost but curious?
There are some that came out about 500,000 podcasts ago where they said, “Everybody needs a podcast.” I’m like, “Not everybody needs a podcast.” There’s something in this industry called podfade. There are over a million podcasts on iTunes. The little asterisks next to it were about 300 to 350 that they have published in the last couple of days.
It’s easy to start but It’s hard to keep it going. I would start with them and say, “Why do you want to do this?” It’s almost like, “Why do you want to run a marathon?” You better have a good answer because somewhere in training, you are going to get tired and say, “This is stupid.” With the podcast, why do you want to do it? “I want to meet people.” That’s a great answer.
Set that you are going to do it at least for a year, “I want to interview people in my industry. I want to share what I know.” That’s a great one. People often say, “Should I be a guest or a host?” With that, It’s like asking, “Should I be an Uber driver or an Uber passenger?” It’s the same great platform but what are your goals? If your goals are to get new exposure and leads, be a guest. If your goal is to nurture your leads and relationships, be a host. I don’t think it has to be an either/or. If you’ve got a why behind it, technology is no longer a factor. We have talked before that it’s so easy now that you can do it from anywhere. It’s the why to keep it going.
Earn respect, awareness, and trust of your customers.
Understanding your why in anything in life is the key to success. You will want to quit at some point. You are going to have pain and roller coaster you go on and the entrepreneurial journey, especially the whole up and down. If you have a destination you are going toward, you know why you are going there. A lot of people think of their family and a better life for their loved ones. If you can hold that in your heart, that’s what your soul is calling you to do. You get through that pain. You will keep publishing and showing up to do the work.
I was an athlete back in the day, and I knew my why. That was why I would get up at 6:00 in the morning and run in the dark every day because I knew I wanted to be in the Olympics one day. I never made it but that wasn’t the point. I knew I wanted to, so I’ve got out of bed every day. That was the whole thing. Podcasting is no different. People come and go like anything. People love to start and quit. The beauty is with a service like yours. It’s giving you the platform and the ability to connect on a professional level, which a lot of people get stuck with.
They get hung up with, “where do I get guests from? How do I connect? How can we show up and know what we are talking about?” There is a lot going on there. It’s not as simple as people think. With a service like yours, that elevates their game right away. It puts them on a level that brings in higher-level guests and connects people on a higher level. It will give them better results, which will give them longevity as to their purpose.
When you start with the podcast, you are like, “I want to be a podcaster. You don’t think of all the work that goes in there. I want to find, reach out, vet guests, and all the rest of this.” Whereas, we make it easy for the host to say, “If Interview Valet has brought them to us, they are vetted and have got the equipment, all of that.”
If you are coming on as a guest to get on other shows, there are three types of people that host one on their podcasts, 1) Friends, 2) Friends of friends, 3) People who want to be their friends. We come in as that friend of a friend. The host knows Interview Valet, and they know the people we work with, so if we vouch for them, they will give them a chance on the podcast.
You are an entrepreneur. You are building business, regardless of what it is for. What struggles have you overcome that a lot of the people reading could be building up online these days? You have a lot of affiliate marketers, people over here in the direct sales niche, building agencies or people doing X, Y and Z. Entrepreneurship is becoming sexy.
When that happens, a lot of people jump in and drown because they don’t realize a 9:00 to 5:00, 40-hour a week job is a cost versus 80 hours week entrepreneurship, especially when you are starting. Startups and things like this are always a challenge. Talk a little bit about that journey. Are there thoughts or advice you have for any entrepreneurs out there reading in the growth mode?
I have done this twice now. One was an eCommerce business, which I always consider building a machine. You build a machine and run it. With Interview Valet, it’s more of a service-based business. It is a human-based business. They were so different. The eCommerce business was building the systems. It was more of an engineering feat than it was an HR personnel. It was more of an IQ, Intelligence Quotient, than an Emotional Quotient, the EQ. With being an ex-engineer, the eCommerce side was easy to set that up and figure all of that out. When I started this, somebody gave me advice, and it was Drew McLellan from the Agency Management Institute.
He said, “When you build a business that is highly dependent on people, it’s more like raising a child than it is building an engine.” That struck me. I looked back on that many times. Early on, I had to do everything. It’s like having a newborn child. You are up in the middle of the night, and there are accidents. It’s fun at the beginning and gets tiring, and they start to have more independence. When you think you are making progress, you take a step back or they fall and hurt themselves.
You’ve got to let them grow. You’ve got to challenge and support them. He said, “At a certain point, you are going to get to it. Your company is going to be like teenagers in the driveway.” Where it’s like, “Dad, would you get out of the driveway? Can I have the keys, so I can get on with my life?” That has been a struggle. I know a lot of people wish that they could go back to the early times with their team and want to do everything. You can’t do that. You can’t raise a child and do everything for them forever.
I have loved every stage of the business and every new stage I have liked even more. Fast forward, a few years, we’ve got the processes down and a team in place. It’s so great to hear a team member say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” or to have somebody else like a host come in and say, “They are so great. Jamie is always awesome.” It’s like somebody complimenting your kids. It’s like, “I have no idea what she did or where she learned that from but I get credit for it.” All entrepreneurship is not the same. Look at what business model you are in because it can be drastically different.
I have managed teams before offline. You give them tasks, SOPs, and stuff but also empower them to make decisions. It’s this similar thing as a kid. It’s like, “Don’t pick up that thing and do that but you can and learn your lesson.”
One of the things we are learning from this remote experience is there are certain people that need to be managed. Our education system sets this up, too. They have to be told what they do and be supervised. They do well in an office cubicle environment. That’s not the people I want to hire. I don’t like managing people. To me, it’s like babysitting. I want to lead people. I want people that can manage themselves. That’s one of those things I look at, too. As an entrepreneur, do you want to manage people or lead people? It is because it’s different. Some of my leadership team are great managers. They do that, so I don’t have to do it.
If you are doing a remote team, you need to have a lot more self-motivated and self-managed. It’s not as easy to manage a team remotely. It’s a whole lot more powerful to lead one remotely. My talent pool was Kalamazoo, Michigan. It’s a great place. I love it. There are many great people here but not every talented person lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We find the best people wherever they are. We’ve got the tools to bring them on and make them part of the team.
Are your company and business completely remote?
It is remote and remote by choice. My last company was brick and mortar. I looked at this and thought, “There’s no way that I can say we are open 9:00 to 5:00 East Coast time unless it’s snowing. The world doesn’t operate that way, and our clients, too.” We’ve got clients and podcasters around the world. The idea that we are only going to be in an 8 or 9-hour timeframe doesn’t work. The other thing is that the best people don’t want to work those hours either. They want flexibility. I love that in our team that work is what you do, not where you go. A couple of years ago, I saw that one of our team members logged in on Easter Sunday and started scheduling emails to go out the next day.
I reached out to her and wished her a Happy Easter. I’m like, “You don’t have to work now.” She’s like, “I want to work now. My kids are home from college. They are over at their girlfriend’s house. My husband went to the nursing home to see his mom. I’ve got a four-hour window here. If I work now, that means I can take some time off during the week.” I’m like, “That’s great.” That gives a whole lot of flexibility. There are a lot of problems in the world but there’s no better time to be alive.
I live in Southwestern Michigan. It’s very agricultural and factory. People always ask, “Where do you work at?” First of all, don’t end sentences with a preposition. That’s one thing. The other one is like, “What do you mean where do I work at?” A better question is, “What do you do? How do you serve people? How do you help them so much that they want to give you money?” That’s a more interesting question than, “What building do you go to show up and make a paycheck?”
Work is what you do, not where you go.
When you are looking at it from that frame, it’s a frame of service and impact rather than, “I’m here to do my job, and you give me a reward for my job,” like a robot. I can only imagine how your team responds to your pep talks on Slack or however you communicate. I assume it’s quite entertaining.
It’s so important for culture to bring people together. We’ve got a private Facebook group where we chat in there. We do Zoom calls every couple of weeks. All the separate teams do a Zoom call each week. We go to a lot of physical meetings. At least we used to, and we would bring team members there. I remember one of them was talking about what they were using. It was Marco Polo or something like that to talk to other people. They are like, “Do you want us to add you to this, too?” I’m like, “I’ve got enough apps on my phone. You don’t need to add me to that one,” but they were talking to each other and knew each other’s families from that.
The technology nowadays is you can connect so quickly and be right in somebody’s life instantly. I was chatting with my wife. She’s in Russia, and we were FaceTiming. My parents came and said, “Hello.” What a time to be alive. It’s so cool. When you take it up a level, and you are doing podcasts and whatever the media is called, you are exchanging value and giving out the knowledge you have gained over your lifetime and capturing it. That’s the one thing I love about podcasts. You are capturing the moment. That information is forever captured or recorded, and it’s there. It’s like an audiobook. It’s there forever. You can always go back and learn from that thing.
I learned more from listening to my own show than almost anything else. When you are conducting one, you are in the moment of thinking about how the flow is going in your questions. You are a little bit out of it when you are the interviewer. I go back and re-listen to my episodes immediately after. That’s when I learned and took the most notes. I find that extremely powerful because I’m the one asking the questions, and I want to know the answers to them. I know my audience does, too. That’s the best part.
We all learn differently. I’m an audible learner. I do much better showing up for class every day and listening to it or going into what we used to call the Navy Gouge Sessions, the night before the test. Sitting there reading through the book is how I learn. Some people are audible learners. They will listen to the book. I feel like I’m sometimes lying when I tell people that I read about 1 to 2 books a week. I can’t tell you the last time I read a physical book. Most of the time, I listen to them at 2X speed as I’m running at half X speed. That’s how I learn. In the same way, you could take a podcast interview, transcribe it and make a blog out of it.
Somebody asked me one time, “If 51% of the US population listens to podcasts now, when do you think it’s going to be 100%?” I’m like, “I don’t know that radio or television ever got to 100%.” Ten percent of the US population is hearing impaired. I don’t care how good my interview is. People that are hearing impaired are not going to listen to it but they might read the transcript. We can create in the medium that is easiest for us and repurpose in the medium that’s easiest for the person.
Let’s talk about repurposing for a moment. Someone is out there creating interviews, doing blogs and podcasts. They have all this stuff going on. What do you recommend for people as far as repurposing goes? What do you advise podcasters to do? You have guys like Gary Vee, who says, “Put as much content everywhere as you possibly can.” I hear somebody else say, “Focus on what you are good at and get very good at that one thing.” Those are two drastically different opinions. What’s your opinion?
My opinion is to make sure you are making the most use of the content you have. Contents are a great thing but if you are writing this down on post-it notes and putting it all over your office, it’s not helping anybody. A lot of times, that’s what we will do. I was guilty of it. I have been on over 1,200 podcast interviews. To me, the fun part is getting on the interview.
Let’s talk and answer it but are you promoting it once it goes live? Are you promoting on all the other social media? Are you getting those transcripts? You don’t have to do it yourself but get a transcript. Have somebody else clean it up. We speak at about 150 words a minute. If you think about that, every four minutes is a blog.
How many blogs could we write out of our transcripts? Some people want to see the words or the video. How easy is it to do that? Create in the way that is easiest for you and repurpose in the way that is easiest for your customers. All it takes is not a whole lot of time. You can throw a little bit of money at it and get an AI transcription done. You can get somebody overseas to make even me sound like, English is my first language and cleans it up. There are so many different ways you can do it.
People are so focused on too much content but they are not using what they have now. Come up with a system to make sure that you get the most out of what you have and ramp it up. If all of it is going through the bucket and the bucket has lots of holes in it, it doesn’t matter how fast you are filling it up and adding more content to it. It’s not going to do any good. Come up with a system first, then scale your content.
I love hearing experienced guys talk about this stuff because, for people out there reading, all of these words can even be foreign to someone new to the game like, “What do you mean by transcript? What are you talking about?” At least for me, I was completely lost in the jargon of the whole thing, even at the beginning. As you start to learn, it’s anything.
The more you learn, the more you know you don’t know anything. You learn something, and you are like, “There’s way more to it now.” The rabbit hole goes even deeper and deeper. That’s when you can feel that overwhelmed and want to quit. That’s when your why comes in. We can bring all the way that back to the whole reason you are doing it in the first place.
The why and the older I get, the more I realize there are a lot of things that are easy to do and hard to do well. I have written a lot of blogs in my life. Every one of them felt like a homework assignment. There are people that love to write. If I can come up with the ideas, outline, and give them bullet points, they will write it and have a great job doing it.
The stuff will get out there. I don’t have to do every part. As an entrepreneur, we have got to ask, “Who should do this,” not, “How can I do this?” When you talk about working the 80-hour weeks, scaling doesn’t mean getting 160 hours in. It’s trying to figure out, “How can I get down to 40 by leveraging other people’s skills and talents?”
Surround yourself with people that are experts in their field, stay in your lane and produce what you produce, do what you do well, and let them do what they do well. When everyone is in their passion and focused on the thing that they are experts at, that’s when you have a well-oiled business. Interview Valet has come a long way since its conception. When did you say you started that?
We started testing it in 2014, started to beta test in 2015, and came out of beta in 2016. We’ve got about a few years of experience. We have had over 500 clients on 20,000 podcast interviews, and we are a data company. When I say this works and this doesn’t work, it’s not my opinion. It’s the customers and the experience telling us this is what works, and this doesn’t. We’ve got a great system down that people can plug into.
I look back on nuclear power, and people say, “That was amazing that you were able to run a nuclear power plant in your twenties.” I’m like, “The amazing part is that people could come up with the systems so that mere mortals could run them.” Most of the sailors in the Navy that are running the nuclear power plants are over the average age of 22. They are high school educated, smart, motivated, and great people but they are not all PhDs in Physics. With the business, that is more and more realizing that I’ve got to come up with the systems and processes so that we can scale this.
Service is great, but success should be based on your systems.
The system is the key. Somebody built it in a way that they could come in and run that thing.
We’ve got core values for the company. One of them used to be, “Our success is proportional to our service.” That was for a few years. We had people that were doing a fantastic job. They were like Superman. They would put on their capes and jump tall buildings. I’m like, “This is not scalable.” Service is great but our success should be based on our systems. That’s when we changed it and said, “Our success is based on our systems.” We’ve still got awesome people that will do super work and jump over tall buildings for our clients but they shouldn’t have to do a magic trick every time to get the results. The results should come from the system.
That brings some clarity to the team atmosphere and some security, understanding that the system is the thing that you are focused on rather than the magic tricks because you can run on magic but the system is solid.
It is from a management perspective too to look if something fails, and it always does. We should always be stressing the system trying to do and deliver more. If something breaks down in there, a lot of times, the first thing people will look at is the person. They didn’t do it. What’s the system? Is the system set up to help them? Is the database we have can be retrieved on their desktop and phone? Is the system set up correctly?
Before you say, “It’s the person.” You hired and trained that person. Why don’t you go back and look at your training or hiring process? I honestly believe that 99% of the world wants to do a great job. There are those less than 1% of psychopaths that want to go and mess things up. Most everybody wants to do a great job. As business owners, are we giving them the opportunities to do that?
As a business owner, you are producing all these amazing opportunities for your network, providing an awesome service, which is very cool and needed in this type of industry. The more professional and interaction we can get with high-level people, the better. That’s what you are providing, which is very cool.
On a personal level, you have been on countless podcasts. I’m sure you can’t even remember the number. You are data-driven, so you know the number. Have you seen a transformation happen internally to yourself over the years of being on the screens, being on microphones, chatting and interacting with people all the time, expressing your views openly, being vulnerable? Have you seen a personal transformation in yourself that possibly you did not expect?
I don’t know that I have ever been asked that one or thought about it. With over 1,200 podcasts interviews I have done, sometimes it’s therapy. By asking those questions, that’s like, “I should have thought about that.” The biggest thing has been public speaking. People had asked me over the years in the latter parts of the interviews than when I first started like, “Where did you learn how to do public speaking?” I have never considered myself a good public speaker.
I did Toastmasters, and I was always the one that would win the award for the most uhs or the most ums. Technically, I’m not a great communicator but the more you talk, interview, and interact with people, the easier it is to tell stories. With that, I would become a better communicator. As a leader, that is so important because we can’t do it all ourselves. We better learn how to communicate and be comfortable with it.
The first podcast I did, I wanted to get sick before it started. The first video that I did was so scary. I took 10 takes to get the 60-second video but I have gotten comfortable with it. For me, it’s easier to record a quick video and send it to the team or text it to somebody than it is for me to type something out. The big thing there is being more comfortable communicating both through video and audio.
As I was asking the question, I had an inkling that it would have to do with presenting, speaking, being in front of people, and having a clear message. In my short journey of doing this, I’m finding my mind is moving faster than my mouth. Whereas before, you would almost stumble over your words. Clear communication is extremely important in all aspects of life, especially if you are managing teams and running businesses that are surrounded by interviews. If you are running a company called the Interview Valet, you are going to be a star and prove that point very well. That’s very cool.
It has been an absolute pleasure having you here on the show. Thank you so much for coming on and dropping much value for our readers, especially the ones that are considering podcasting or broadcasting in any fashion or putting out content. Maybe they are shy about it or not sure of the steps to take.
For the other people that are reading and have shows that are looking for quality guests or guests that have books or coaching programs that need to get out of, people need to see these things. They are doing a disservice by not reaching as many people as they possibly can. I’m happy that there are guys like you and your company who can help bridge that gap and connect people the way that they deserve to be connected so that they can all get the impact from each other. Thank you for being here and bringing your awesome energy, Tom. It has been a blast.
Thank you, Aaron. Anybody that says doing a podcast is easy has either never done it or never done it well. Only the great ones make it look easy. Here’s my pitch. If you enjoy Aaron’s podcast and all the content they bring, take a few minutes, leave the rating, and review. If there’s anything that I can do for you, you don’t have to figure out what Tom Schwab in Kalamazoo, Michigan I am. You can go to InterviewValet.com/GrowthPodcast. I am selling a lot of copies of the book. I give more away. If you want a free copy, I will mail you one there. If you want to talk and see how we could help you, either with guests or as a host, I will put my calendar link there, too.
Thanks again for being here, Tom. I appreciate your time.
Thank you, Aaron.
Important Links:
About Thomas M. Schwab
Marketing at it’s heart is starting a conversation with someone who could be an ideal customer.
If you can’t make it through the noise, how will you drive traffic and leads?
The answer is not to add to the noise to be heard, but to speak directly to your dream customers. There is no easier or effective way than being featured on targeted podcast interviews they already listen to.
Interview Valet makes it easy for the podcast host and the guest. We take care of everything but the speaking. A white glove concierge level service, you get on the big podcasts and turn listeners into leads with a proven marketing system.
Who we work with:
Entrepreneurs, coaches, authors, franchisors, brands
Focusing on the Business, Faith and Health verticals
How we serve our customers (The Podcast Guest):
You are the guest, we take care of the rest.
We take care of everything but the speaking at the podcast interview.
Education, training , equipment, scheduling and ongoing optimization.
How we help podcast hosts:
Great Certified Guest provided at no cost
Exclusive podcast affiliate program
Contact me at:
Tom @InterviewValet.com