Raymond's Pod-Casting Call: A Musician's Change of Tune - Experienced Entrepreneur 3 of 3

Hello there, scoob believer. Hey, if you're anything like me, I am just so tired of going from screen to screen to screen, trying to figure out my analytics for all my social medias and trying to figure out where I can put any and all my energies to get as much reach as I can. Well, I think I've finally found the solution Elementary analytics, that's right. Elementary analytics. Now, at a single press of a button, I can see all my social media analytics, from Google to Twitter to Facebook, all my important information all on one screen. On one screen, can you believe it? And if you really needed to, you could print charts for any possible meetings you might have. If you want to learn more about this amazing program, go to tuepodcastnet backslash ea for a 14 day free trial with no credit card needed. That's tuepodcastnet backslash ea for a 14 day free trial. Try it right now and see what it can do for you. That's discovered entrepreneur, episode number 53. Number 53, and that's good enough for me. Woo, welcome to the Undiscovered Entrepreneur, the podcast where brand new entrepreneurs come to life and could quite possibly be discovered To me, dj Scoob and the rest of the Scoob believers, as we help these new businesses become a reality. And now way we go. Hello, scoob believer, and welcome to another episode of the Undiscovered Entrepreneur. And it's me, dj Scoob, looking at you, whatever device you happen to be listening on. Well, today we are actually talking to three of three, our last experienced entrepreneur, and today we are talking to Raymond. Now, Raymond, actually and this is great he actually started in the music industry and right after COVID hit, things kind of slowed down for him so he decided to start a podcasting agency. We're going to get into a little bit of what that is in this next episode, so join me as we listen to Raymond. Salutations, scoob believers. And we are here again with another amazing entrepreneur. Today we are interviewing an experienced entrepreneur. Today we are talking to Raymond. Hey, raymond, how are you?

I'm doing absolutely great things. Thanks for having me.

All right, great to have you here, raymond on the Undiscovered Entrepreneur. Now I have a really kind of a serious question to ask you. Okay, you ready, I'm listening. All right, are you a Scoob believer? You know, I am All right. Thank you for making a Scoob believer, raymond. I really super appreciate that. So we're going to go over some specific questions that I ask my experienced entrepreneur. So the first thing I really want to do is have you described for me who you are, what your entrepreneur adventure is and how you actually got started in it.

Yeah, sure, so my direction changed quite drastically at a point in my life, but I originally started out being a professional musician and just working with artists, like recording and just following the path of a musician, until COVID obviously happened and that ripped the rug underneath my feet. So I had to improvise a little bit and I went up to my business partner I think it was in March 2020 and I said I've got a good idea, I think this will work well, and we ended up starting a podcast agency, believe it or not. So it's a very different from the music scene. But yeah, our podcast agency we've been running now for three years and it's just been absolutely blast going on down this entrepreneurial journey, which is obviously so different from a music career.

Oh right, so explain to me exactly what a podcast agency does, I mean. What is that about?

Sure. So there's a lot of speakers, authors and entrepreneurs that want to get some exposure, either for their book, product or service, and then they can get that exposure by speaking on podcasts that are filled with listeners that might be potential clients. So it's a form of marketing, and generally what we'll do then is we'll reach out to podcasts such as yourself and pitch a guest to them, and then obviously it's good content for the podcast. We'll see some cross-pollination and social media happening, but then our clients obviously benefit from speaking on podcasts and we just do the agency work from the booking side, as well as communication and such All right, that's fantastic.

That's good work to have. A lot of us have sometimes have a rough time finding guests and things like that for our podcast, so it's good to have somebody that's kind of like a medium person there that said, oh, this is the perfect person for your podcast. I think you would really benefit from having this author in your podcast. So really appreciate your work. That's awesome.

Yeah, it's been an absolutely tough journey, learning. Sometimes I'm going to be honest with you the competition is also a step, but it's a sort of rewarding when you work with some of the clients that get back to you and praise you for the booking of a certain podcast which they were able to make good book sales out of. So, yeah, there's also a non-profit client that we've worked with that's also just been so rewarding with, like a Save the Oceans campaign. So we've gotten involved a little bit with those kind of projects as well and I find a lot more fulfillment with those kind of projects. So, yeah, it's been absolutely great to recommend guests to podcasts in order for them to obviously have new content each week or month.

That's awesome. You really have to explain this. Is you kind of caught yourself here? So you really have to explain to me how you went from the music industry over to this podcast and what was the transition. How did that work exactly?

Well, at the time COVID struck, I was quite in a big amount of debt, which I was able to accumulate even more during the trying times of starting this business. So I still had year-in-there shows to play and records to do during COVID, but it was so small and it happened very discreetly, or it happened a little bit later on in the year of 2020. So I was able to somewhat sustain myself here and there from gigs, but there were obviously not nearly as many shows as what we had before COVID. So during that period we started building the website for our business and we started just reaching out to clients and within I think the first two months or so, we had three clients which felt amazing, especially being a South African and being able to generate income that's not even from South Africa, that's more from like an international, like a worldwide client base. So it was a lot of fun learning all of the aspects of the podcast industry and I was always a podcast listener, so I knew there was a market for guests and the podcast to be interviewing these guests. So we just went on a hunch and got a few clients and after we got the ball rolling it just became a thing of how do we grow this, how do we scale this a little bit bigger, you know, it's amazing to me sometimes how situations could change from one thing to another in times of need and then sometimes just kind of on a whim where it's like, hey, this sounds cool, let me try this.

That's kind of what I did with my podcast too, because I started out being one via karaoke DJ and a music DJ, but then it kind of led me over here to the podcasting world and I haven't been back since. But yeah, it's amazing, that's a great story.

Yeah, I love the radio presenter attitude that you also bring towards your podcast. It's very it's welcoming. I do my best. Yeah, that's a good trait to have. I think a lot of podcast hosts are maybe a little bit shy or a little bit timid and such, but I like your energy. No thanks, thank you. There we go there. It is yeah, there. It is there. It is yeah, all right.

All right. So I would like to know, like in your first year of actually getting onto the podcast agency, if you had some problems, pitfalls, some things that happened to you that were kind of like oh, why is this happening to me? Can you kind of explain one of those two, one of one or two of those to me please?

Sure. So, yeah, one of our biggest pitfalls we had at the start we used to quote our clients based on per podcast, like a paper booking kind of system, and our clients were paying, I think $150 or $160 at that stage per booking. We were getting them on these shows, I think podcasts. So when we would book them on shows that got a lot of clients for them or that got a lot of leads for them, they would say book me on more of those kind of podcasts, and some of the other shows we were booking them weren't getting them the same kind of reach. But they would also complain about the fact that there wasn't a sliding scale on which the bookings were costing $150 no matter how big the podcast is we were booking them on. So that got us really thinking and we were actually able to collect about 50 or like 55 podcasts, personal download statistics, which we were able to see, then some some algorithm in the way where we can look at public states stats as well as the private stats we had from podcasts that shared them with us in confidentiality, and we were able to come up with a tier system that calculates the estimated reach of between two numbers of what a podcast download would be. So that was. That was quite a big challenge that we were able to break through and then offering our clients a way where they could pay for the size of the podcast instead of per the opportunity. So that was definitely a big pitfall that we fell in close to be lost. Some of our clients that eventually felt like we weren't able to book them on big podcasts anymore. We were only pitching them smaller shows, so we didn't obviously had to also look at the value of smaller shows and try and get our clients to capitalize on some of the smaller shows that they also speak on, because they can be a lot more niche. So the two biggest challenges were definitely reinventing our pricing model, along with the algorithm, as well as just clients being very particular about the kind of podcasts that they wanted to speak on, and we weren't able to deliver on that in the beginning until we learned some strategies on how to get them on some of the bigger shows.

And we learned that as the process goes on. You know we have to change our things a little bit, but that's okay because that's just part of the process. That's what we do to kind of get where we're going, and it's good that you do that. Sounds like it's been pretty good for you since then.

Yeah, yeah Well, it helped me pay off my debt. I had quite a cumbersome debt. I think my debt was close to in-rand value. It was about 400,000 Rand, which is close to like $20,000. So, yeah, I was quite under a lot of debt and the business helped open up a new income revenue stream that was able to smash that. So I'm pretty happy about that.

That's good, that's amazing, and the other thing that we do is sometimes it's because we want to, sometimes it's out of desperation, but at the same time it leads us into a direction that can be amazing for us, even for our future.

So it reminds me of a saying. I don't know if it's confucius, but it's something like an every crisis comes opportunity.

Oh yeah, definitely, definitely, 100%. What I'd like to do here is back when you were getting started in the podcast agency. Did you have any mentors or anybody that you followed that really helped you along in what you were doing? Did you have anybody that you idolized to get you where you are now?

We later on had one of our clients become actually a business coach. His name is Yaro Stalk. So he's been, I think, on over 200 podcasts, so he's got a good track record and he was able to also help us with our business in the sense of coaching us in day-to-day delegation and helping us with a new copy for our website. And it was quite great working with Yaro because not only was he our client that we looked up at, that was this very successful businessman. We were able to later stage into a pottery agreement with him, which turned out to be a business coaching for our services trade. So he was definitely very influential. He taught us about how to differentiate, get differentiating points when you're marketing and all these aspects of just getting and turning over more clients. So, yeah, he definitely helped us a lot with the coaching that we did with him, so he would definitely be a mentor that we had up until this point.

That's awesome. It's always nice to run into somebody like that that wants to help you so much and lead you along in a way that they already know that you're going to succeed, and then you do so. That's always nice. What was his name? Yaris. What was his last name? Do you remember?

Yaro Stark. But you don't spell it like the start, for, like a Tony Stark, it's S-T-A-R-A-K. Oh. Okay, and then you spell his first name, yaro Y-A-R-O. Okay.

Yaro Stark. I like that. That's awesome. So does he have his own podcast or did he have like a website?

Yeah, he's got his own podcast. It's called Adventure Capital and I think it's something else now. He might have changed the name recently, but he was more a guest on a bunch of podcasts. He blew up back when blogging was quite a big thing as well and he made quite a good training model out of how to be a successful blogger and make money out of it, and he was traveling across the world as a digital entrepreneur or digital nomad, so he was promoting that kind of lifestyle. But he's got a business now called inboxcom. So that's it where his primary focus is. It's email management.

Okay, that's amazing. We'll go ahead and try to link Yaris into the show notes so people can look him up, if you want to do that.

Great business mentor. I'd recommend him a hundred times. All right, awesome.

And, in hindsight of what you've been doing so far, looking back, is there a failure that you're actually proud of? I mean, I know there's a few failures that I've had where I'm like you know, I'm glad I had that failure because I wouldn't be where I am now. So do you have anything like that you can kind of tell us about?

Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's quite an embarrassing story. But when we just started prospecting, we used to go and collect a bunch of email addresses and then at the start we didn't know anything about copywriting, so we were just sending bulk emails out to everybody, like hey, we're a podcast agency, if you want to use us, kind of thing, you know. So I ended up, instead of cc or bcc everybody, I was cc about 150 people in a single email and they went mad because I was distributing email addresses and such because, but. But my most of those email addresses were found online as well, so they were public. But yeah, that was definitely an error that I've learned. You have to be very intinctful and careful with your work when you are especially doing cold outreach, as that's your first impression. There was one lady that actually responded out of the 150 and she, she, she sent a nice warm email just saying like don't worry about these guys, kind of thing. There was about three or four people in the 150 list that that got quite upset. So she was she was quite kind in sending me email.

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, bcc that's what we're looking for, not cc. Yeah, okay, just so you know, a lot of a lot of email service providers actually do that for you now, like convert kit and mail champ, things like that you don't have to worry about that so much. But if you're using like, like, Gmail yeah, Gmail or anything like that. Yeah, you got to make sure you put that spot.

Yeah, luckily that was quite early on when we started the business. I think we tried to maintain our reputation a bit better after that.

No, that's good, that's good, and you learned from it. That was the important part that you learned from it. So I mean now, what I'd really like to know is kind of like the opposite of that. Is there accomplishment that you've had at this point that you're really proud of having? What's your most successful accomplishment you like to talk about?

I guess just the achievements of some of our clients. We've booked some of our clients on podcasts that get well over 50,000 downloads, so that's quite a good amount of exposure that they're getting from those kind of podcasts. And yeah, I think I would have never thought we would have been able to build our team up to at a point we had 12 agents working with us and we've served well over 75 clients. So just the achievement of building a business and never really being in the entrepreneurial seat that I was. So, yeah, it was great to be able to pivot from the music scene into this business. They were obviously struggling at times, but in my professional musician career just playing some big stages we've got massive festivals here in South Africa, where there's 40, 50,000 people at our Afrikaans music festival. So those would probably be the best examples I could give you.

I mean, do you have your own podcast?

So starting your own podcast, I think, is still much better than starting a YouTube channel, as YouTube is a lot more saturated. But when we were looking at starting our own podcast, the market was of that sort that you also need to put in a lot of time investments into the podcast and that can take a long time for the podcast to start building out some popularity, as I'm sure you know. So speaking on another podcast as a guest has always been a bit of a quicker turnover, I think. But obviously you are building up more of a platform with a loyal listener base over time. So there's two different models and we've just decided to stick more to the guest appearances than having our own show.

Because I was always. I was like wondering if you were able to do like a mixture of a podcast with your music ability and kind of use that Cause now you're taking the best of both worlds and putting them together into one type of thing. So I don't know. I was just crossed my mind there, so I was just curious if you did anything like that.

For sure. Well, I mean, podcasting can get so niche. That's what I love about it. You can get a show that talks about fishing, you can get a show that talks about fly fishing, and you can even have a podcast that talks about the music industry and how to be successful in the music industry. It doesn't even have to be music playing or playing instruments of any sorts on the podcast. I think just discussing the industry and how to be successful or how to grow in the music industry could be valuable as well.

Yeah, absolutely, talk about anything like that. We'll definitely get you to the audience because there's information that we want to know about Anybody that wants to break into the industry. Hey, here's a good way to do it, or here's what I did, or anything like that. So I don't know. You never know.

Yeah, I think that's the beauty of podcasting is you can be educated, and I think if you're able to educate and entertain an audience, then your content's gonna grow and raise to the top. I always say cream raises to the top.

Well, I try to entertain by comedy. If you couldn't tell already With information, yeah, now you can just literally 10 out of 10 there.

Oh good, yes.

All right, All right, so that's great. Thank you so much for that. As a new entrepreneur because most of my audience are brand new entrepreneurs are just getting started in their entrepreneurial adventure what advice would you give us before taking that jump into entrepreneurship? What's that main thing you wanna be able to tell everybody? Hey, keep this in mind as you're going along.

Well, what worked really well? Obviously I can only speak from my own experience, but what worked really well for me was getting a good business partner who was complimenting me in areas where I was lacking, and vice versa. He's actually quite introverted and more of behind the scenes integrator kind of guy that comes up with crazy things I would have never thought of, but crazy good things. But I think what worked really well for me was just having a business partner that was just as motivated as me, and I think we both came from the same desperation at that time as well, because he's also a professional musician. He was working with quite a few artists here in South Africa too, and when COVID came, he also went into like a shell shock from not having shows to play anymore. So I think we were both very motivated to get this business off the ground when we started it. So, yeah, just getting a good business partner who is as motivated as you and has some supplementary skill sets that you don't have yourself.

Yeah, something. That is the part that you're missing, that you need that you could have in somebody else. That's who you want as a business partner to kind of compliment. What you're is, if it's not in your zone of genius but it's in their zone of genius, that's the type of partner you want to have. That way you have that complimentary to each other. If you don't mind me asking who's your business partner, what's his name?

Eric Harber. So it's also Africans or South African last name, but you spell it G E R B? E R Eric.

Harber, nice, and I don't know if you explain this to me already, but I'm going to ask you again. Anyway, how did you guys meet? I mean, I know you go through, we're both of the music industry and that kind of thing, but how did that go about?

Yeah, the music industry in South Africa is actually quite small. Most of the musicians know most of the musicians but, funny enough, I met him. He was in a band called Red Hillen and I went to one of the festivals where they were playing and I saw him on stage and thought, wow, this guy's really talented, that really gifted. And then just had a chat with him after the show and then from there on we just became friends.

It's amazing how, you know, some people are intimidated by somebody like that, where they're really talented and they sound really good, but they're like, oh, he's not going to want to talk to me, I don't want to have anything to. You know, he won't want to have anything to do with you. But if you have the courage just to walk up and say, Hi, my name is Raymond, how are you? This is, you know what I do. And then he hit it off and suddenly here's your business partner. So you just never know. You know, stay away from that fear, because you know you don't know what could come about of it. I always talk about fear and all my podcasts and how we overcome fear to get to new areas in our business. So that's amazing.

Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of people project some of their own insecurities on to other musicians that are maybe more gifted than them. But the crazy thing about music is music is so wide. You can be really good at three or four things that the other guitar player is not going to be good at, so there's always so much like ground to cover. So asking objectively who's the better musician is sometimes a tough, arbitrary question.

Maybe you just need to have a rock off to see who's better.

A deal.

Yeah, we're looking forward to that. Okay, so what I like to do with all my guests, experienced or not, is to see what their, where their goals are for the next six months. So, raymond, in the next six months, what do you see yourself in your business?

I guess I'd like to offer a new service we are looking at training people in. So, for instance, if a business has a secretary or a virtual assistant, logistic assistant, to train those kind of members or somebody in a sales and marketing team how to book their founder or CEO on podcasts as a form of marketing exposure. So going into teaching them the ins and outs of the podcast industry and also helping them with the first four podcasts that they booked their founders on. So basically like a train somebody internally on your team how to book your own podcasts or how to book the founder on podcasts. So we haven't landed a client of that yet, but offering that part of the business. I'd like to expand that a little bit more this year, more of like a training program, and then we have a free course where we share ways of how to book yourself on podcasts too. So we released that at the start of this year and I went through quite a bit of a tough time in my personal life so I wasn't able to market the course. But I'd like to also get the course to just do a little bit better this year At the second half now, just to get some more downloads and help people out with the free course that we have. So yeah, I guess, just get more downloads for that and get more clients for our other division of the business, the new division.

And that free course. Is that available right now?

Yeah, 100%. It's at podcastconnectionorg Get booked now. So podcastconnectionorg forward slash get now.

All right, and we're going to have that in the show notes. So if you want to check out this free course program, check that out. Click on the link in the show notes and we'll see if we can get you some people to take a look at that.

Okay, Thanks so much, dj Scoop. I love it. Man, I'm going to call you Dr Scoop.

That's okay, as long as Scoop's in there somewhere, right, as long as it's in there, all right. Raymond, this is your time to shine. Now I want you to actually advertise yourself. I want you to tell us where to find you, how to find you and all that good stuff. Okay, ready, set go.

Sure, so if anybody is looking for a podcast agent to book them on podcasts, you can go check out our website, podcastconnectionorg, and if you are interested in having someone in your business book, you can also check us out there. And just check me out on Instagram as well. Connect with Ray, so you guys are welcome to follow me. I share some cool tips there as well on the podcast industry and how to benefit from it. Get better ROI and, yeah, just some cool content on my Instagram as well, so you can follow me there.

All right, raymond, thank you so, so much for being an undiscovered entrepreneur. I really appreciate you coming out here and I'm looking forward to maybe following up with you in six months so we can see if you hit those goals. Is that okay? That sounds good, man. All right, thank you. So everybody stay tuned for the wrap up. Okay, thank you, and take care, have a great day. Thanks so much. Bye, bye, all right, that was Raymond. That great experience, entrepreneur, a lot of great things. I love the fact that he went from one thing to another. I love hearing about people that pivot from one type of business to another, from the music industry to helping podcasts get guests and things like that. He explained how that worked. I'm going to have to listen back to that just so I can get all together in my head. But yeah, raymond was amazing. I love the fact that he has new products that have come out, so you know he's always learning new and different types of things. And take a look in the show notes for that free course that he has and let's see where he goes from there. I'm really excited to follow up with Raymond in the next six months and see what happens. All right, so stuff that's going on with me right now. My freebie is going to be ready on September 26, 2023, if you're listening to the future and it's going to be something pretty cool. I almost did with it and it will definitely be ready. If you want to get on a waiting list to receive that freebie, you can email me at you podcast 2021 at gmailcom and let me know that you want to get on that waiting list. Also, group coaching is still going to be available. I only have five spots left and I want you to take advantage of those if you can. That's going to be happening on October 3. So if you want to get in on the waiting list on that or get one of those five spots, you can email me at doingitodaycoaching at gmailcom. Once again, just like I said before, there is a very, very little, teeny, tiny, minor cross involved with that. Use that just to keep the podcast rolling. So I really would appreciate it. Also, I'm really excited I actually set a date for myself to quit both of my jobs. That's right, the two jobs I'm working right now. I'm going to quit both of those on January 1, 2025. So I'm actually giving myself just about a year and a couple months to be able to start with enough income doing the podcast and whatnot, to quit both jobs. You're going to see new products coming from me that you can purchase to help you get going on your entrepreneur adventure. All right, thank you very much for a great three part series of experience entrepreneurs. In the next episode we're going back to the coaching. So I hope you enjoy that and we will talk to you next week. Thank you everybody, bye, bye, hello there, dj Scoob here and I just want to personally say thank you for listening to my program. I really hope you learned something. Tune in in two weeks to listen to another brand new entrepreneur and remember I can, I am, I will and I'm doing it today.