Building the business you really want takes more than tactics—it requires courage, clarity, and consistency. In this one-year anniversary episode, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo look back on 52 episodes of real talk and share their biggest surprises, lessons learned, and how podcasting has become a surprising business asset. From embracing imperfect systems to rethinking visibility strategies, they pull back the curtain on what’s worked, what didn’t, and what they’re excited about in year two.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
One Year Of Real Talk: What We’ve Learned About Building The Business You Really Want
One Year Of Real Talk: Podcasting Journey Unveiled
Can you believe it? It has been a full year, almost. Gwen, we are on episode 52. Our average reader doesn’t know we’re on episode 52 because we don’t put the episode numbers in our title but 52 episodes of challenging business, conventional wisdom, sharing some real stories from the trenches and proving, I think beyond the shadow of Adele that you can build a successful business without sacrificing what matters most. I’m Tonya Kubo, in case you’re new here. Gwen, I want to take this over to you. As we launch into the celebration of our first anniversary of our show, what do you feel about where we are?
I had almost no doubt that we would give here because I knew I was going to love podcasting. I had no doubt because I’ve always been comfortable on a stage and on video. None of the things that often hold up people from doing a show were the reason I hadn’t done a show. Everyone’s like, “You should be podcasting.” That was not why I was not podcasting because people say, “You’ll be good on videos.” I don’t have any doubt about it. It doesn’t bother me the least. I waited until we had something we wanted to talk about. I had almost no doubt that we would get here. I didn’t. We committed originally to thirteen episodes.
That was our initial commitment. Our test run.
Our initial test run was 90 days and I knew 4 or 5 episodes in, it was like, “This is going to keep going,” because the conversations are interesting. Both for those who are reading but they’re also interesting for us. We talked about it later and it was like, “That was a very interesting conversation.” We hope it’s interesting for the reader. It appears that it’s interesting for the reader, but it’s interesting for us. It hasn’t felt like drudgery or one of those commitments like, “We got to record an episode.” It’s never approaching that thing. Getting here is not surprising. What is surprising is it feels like it got here fast.
It did. I would add that to my surprises, too. If it feels like I got here way faster than I thought it would.
I remember when we were recording in the 40s and it was like, “We’re going to be like at 52,” which would officially be the year as you said. I don’t remember how many we launched in the same week. Technically, we’re a couple weeks when the official launch date but that came fast. I know there’s a couple times that you were like, “I’m not sure if it’s doing what it needs to be doing.”
I was like, “We’re just going to stick with it. We’re going to keep going. We’re keep doing it,” which is ironic because that’s what we’re just talking about in our previous episode. Sometimes, it’s just about going kachunk, kachunk, and kachunk and being steady about. I would say the biggest surprise was how fast it came. I’m not surprised that we’re here. I’m not surprised at the variety of topics that we’ve covered. I’m also not surprised that we still have a lot to talk about.
That’s true. I was thinking about that. I’ll come back to that piece. Here’s what I’m thinking we can do. It would be fun for us but also interesting for the reader to reflect on some of our biggest lessons that we’ve gotten. You’ve already shared what surprises most about the journey. There’s a few surprises I’d like to add to that and a teensy-winsy sneak peek and I’ll just give it in case we go a different direction with the episode.
We’ll spend the next four episodes digging deeper into the big themes that have emerged and what’s resonated with our readers. Stick through for episodes 53 to 56 because that will dig deeper into some of the more reader focused issues but let’s talk about the surprises. The biggest surprise I agree is how fast it came and also there’s so much more ground to cover. As the person who does a lot of the content planning, we have a conversation. I’m the person who says, “What makes sense for an episode?” Sometimes, we have a conversation where we’re like, “This is an episode.” I go to outline and I go, “This is five episodes.”
That had happened more than once.
When it comes to a podcast episode, you have two choices: go deep and narrow, or cover many points shallowly. Share on XMastering Podcast Content: Depth Vs. Breadth
For any of our readers who are hosts, you probably know this but if you’re thinking about a show you may not. You have two choices with an episode. You can either go narrow and deep. One to three key points max and go deep on those or you can cover a lot of key points at a very shallow level. There’s no wrong answer but not every topic can be appropriately addressed if you’re just scratching the surface, just like not every topic deserves a whole 40-minute discussion of it. For me, I am still surprised that I don’t feel like I’m just recycling the same idea over and over again when I’m coming to the table to think about episodes. That is by far a big surprise for me. Any others that you wanted to add?
No. As I said, I knew it would be fun. I knew I would enjoy it. The other thing I would be that I will say is and this is something that I have to take your word for because I don’t know. The show has done better than I thought it might from a statistics standpoint. As I said, I don’t know what is an appropriate measurement but I know you do because you do this for a lot of other folks and look at these numbers and pay attention to it.
I know you said that we’ve done very well for a show that is just coming up on their one-year anniversary from a readership or viewership and all of the various measurements. We’re not necessarily talking about what I would call sexy topics. I was not necessarily expecting that we would do well under what I’ll call traditional measurements.
Beyond The Mic: The Strategic Purpose Of Our Podcast
Let’s talk a little bit. We can talk about what we thought we were designing the show to accomplish and what it accomplished. Let’s first start with how we were basing our measurements of success. You’re right, the show has performed extraordinarily well compared to what was expected. Now, what I was looking at, because initially we had set out this show, the idea was, I’m just going to be blunt, things that I knew as a marketing professional.
I knew that you tend to resonate best with our ideal client when they can hear you and see you. As the Ops minded, marketing professional, I also know there’s only so many plane trips I can put you on in any given year. Even though we live in California, it still dramatically reduces the number of stages you can step on any given year.
Having a marketing plan that’s 100% dependent on you speaking at in-person conferences and leading workshops is not going to get us to where we need to be or where we want to be I should say. Having you guessed how to teach in membership communities is still dependent on somebody hearing you and seeing you talk about, I’m just going to say your genius. I get to call you a genius if I want. You don’t have to agree with me.
I don’t have to disagree with you either, though.
In order for them to believe that they can trust you with their community. In thinking of like, what’s the easiest way to do that? We thought about live streaming. The problem with live streaming though that you didn’t love is that it forces you to be in a location with a strong internet connection on the specific date and a specific time. If we tell people that you’re going to do that a month from now, you have to arrange your life around that and you don’t love that constraint. You didn’t become an entrepreneur because you wanted a job.
I’m very good about hitting appointments but that regularity gets a bit much. I can do it for the short term.
You didn’t love the idea of live streaming being a long-term solution. It came down to podcasting because we could record our interviews and our episodes whenever and then work as far ahead as we wanted to work ahead then deliver those. It still gave you the opportunity to talk about things in your own words with your own perspective. You’re not interrupted unless I interrupt you, which I do a lot but it’s all for the greater good of our reader and people can binge it.
You don’t have to talk for four hours straight just because somebody wants to listen to you for four hours straight. It can just queue up five episodes and they can blissfully have their Gwen marathon while you and I are sleeping or doing other things. That’s where we landed on podcasts as the appropriate vehicle to achieve our goals. Now, we thought the idea would be people hear about you. They don’t know about you too much, so they’re going to listen to thirteen episodes and then they’re going to decide maybe they want to work with you. That didn’t happen. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying we don’t have evidence so much of that happening.
What we’ve seen is a lot of our former clients have been the ones to be the big bingers and some have come back. We’ve had some former clients who’ve come back to work with us because the show reminded them of the value they had gotten before. We have seen an uptick in invitations for interviews and for workshops and stuff mainly because we can send them some episodes to say when we present this topic that this is what we’re talking about. They get a sense of hearing you and how you’re delivering it.
As we were planning all that out, when I was looking at comparable shows, I was thinking, “Other business focus shows that aren’t marketing focus,” because we know the marketing shows do get high listenership because everybody’s looking for the fast track to leads. They want lead gen and visibility. They want to go viral. They want big email subscription numbers. Those marketing focus shows tend to do very well. It is a much more crowded market in all fairness, but they do tend to get more downloads than the more, let’s talk about your business model, business efficiency, or business effectiveness, whether its operations or accountability or however you want to color it.
Those shows don’t do as well. What I looked at is I looked at some of the people we know and respect and we know that they deliver good information on their shows. I just asked their numbers and what was interesting is most of them hit about 300 downloads a month around the three-year mark if they were running ads to their show. All of those shows were interview based shows. They were bringing a different guest on for every episode and that guest was part of their visibility lift.
I thought for us, “I’m good on the marketing side. I might be able to do a little bit better,” but readers might get a little bit of just you and me and the visibility could be a bit limited if we’re just working on my known audience and you’re known audience. I thought, “If we hit 300 downloads a month our first year, I would say we’re doing well since most competitors are at the 350 mark about three years in.” For a few months, we’re sitting at about 400 downloads per month.
We’re not consistently getting more than 100 downloads per week. It seems that we get one big week and then they binge past episodes. That seems to be the reader’s cadence but that also tracks with my own habits. If I was an ideal client, I do like to read one show and just binge it for about 4 to 6 episodes depending on how long the episodes are, then I want to be on a different show next week. I don’t like to read the same show every single week. Those are my thoughts. Anything you want to add to that, Gwen?
No, but as I said, I found the whole thing fascinating because this is not something I paid attention to in the past. It was interesting as we were going along and you were talking about it. I would say, “That seems good. Is that good? I don’t know. Is that a good number? It seems like a good number but it could be a horrible number. I have no idea.”
YouTube’s Hidden Power: Unlocking Views With Titles & Descriptions
I will share another surprise. My other surprises are YouTube. I know what I know about podcasting and that is 50% of your listeners are going to be on Apple. The other 50% will be on anything that’s not Apple altogether. We are neck and neck Apple and Spotify. That’s because the number of end-all be-all listening apps have diminished through mergers and acquisitions and such on the Android side. Spotify has become that unilateral favorite.
Not that people don’t listen to other apps. YouTube entered the podcast scene. It had not been on the podcast seen when we started doing this. You can now listen to audio only on YouTube but I had always been told if you’re going to just distribute on video, it’s a whole different ballgame. You need a lot of polish and pizzazz. You need three camera angles and high editing. We started off with high production value on the video side. Ultimately, cost is what had us changing gears on that. We can keep doing this if we reduce the cost of the show.
We knew that. We can go for a full year if everything stays equal and we reduce the cost of producing the show or we could probably swing this level of production investment for another six months. We just decided to dramatically strip down the production value on the video side, then go more into ensuring longevity. What has surprised me on the YouTube front is the production value of our video has not been much of a consideration. What has affected either huge dips in our viewership or huge spikes have been our episode titles and our descriptions.
Although, that’s a bit surprising, it’s not because YouTube is a huge search engine. Being able to make it searchable and our prediction value was never like 80 times better than it is now.
A marketing plan 100% dependent on in-person speaking and workshops won't get us where we need or want to be. Share on XWe were not Diary of a CEO ever.
It was not that level and at our worst, it’s also not bad because both of us have had enough experience in whatnot. We’re using good mics and good cameras, so it’s never been a horrible production. Even if I was cutting it together, it still wouldn’t be a horrible production. That part didn’t surprise me. It didn’t surprise me once we realized how important the descriptions and titles were because it’s like, “It needs to be searchable before someone finds it.” Nothing is so bad that they’re going to say, “I can’t stand to watch/read this.”
What that does is, any of my fellow live streamers here, this will resonate with you. It reinforces the fact that what you do around the episode is so much more important than what you do for the episode. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay attention to your episode topic, your outline, or the actual value provided within the episode. Those things are important, but if you can’t package them effectively, nobody’s ever going to get to the value.
It’s the effort that you take to promote the episode before it comes out and promote it after it comes out to help people understand how their life will be better as a result of reading, what they should be reading for and making sure that you deliver on all of that. It’s not so much there’s no clickbait because we will pick compelling titles in such to get people to pay attention, but we always deliver on whatever that promise is.
The other thing, I’ll say surprising but it’s only because I’m not someone who spends a lot of time reading episodes or watching YouTube videos or any of that. That’s just not my personal behavior. It was how valuable the Shorts are.
Short-Form Success: The Unexpected Impact Of Video Shorts
The same for me because that’s on my list of surprises.
The other side of it is my husband does like watching YouTube videos. He was like, “Are you guys doing Shorts? You need to be doing Shorts.” It was like, “I think we’re doing.” It was one of those like, “I don’t know what we’re doing. Tiny makes me talk. I talk and then I’m done.” All the rest is like magic in the background which I love. He was very much about you need to make sure we’re having Shorts and we’re having Shorts but we’ve done more about putting those up on LinkedIn and all the rest of it. The Shorts do get a whole lot of attraction way more than I was necessarily expecting them to get. That’s a totally observational and non-factual phase.
There’s a couple of surprises there. When we went into this, I knew that Shorts were important for YouTube viewership. I knew that. I knew that Shorts are a lot of times how people on YouTube discover new people and then they’ll follow that new person. They’ll watch a few Shorts and they’re like, “I like this,” then they’ll go to investigate their channel and pick up some of their longer content. One very specific variable that was quite the trigger in there that I hadn’t planned on because I didn’t know it existed when we started this. It’s linking the Short to the full episode because there’s a way to do that on the back end of YouTube.
When we started doing that, our longer episode viewership went up. We picked up like five extra views every week, which isn’t a ton but it’s more than we had. We celebrate the incremental wins around here. That was a big needle mover for us where I was surprised. I didn’t think the Shorts on LinkedIn would make any difference because LinkedIn is very new to video at all. LinkedIn hasn’t known how to, I would say, effectively position or present video content to the right people.
When I go on to LinkedIn, all I ever see are professional creator’s videos. It’s people who have very high production value. I wasn’t thinking that our little, let’s just say, homegrown clips because they’re very homegrown. Our homegrown clips would do anything for us but they do. They get great comments and not every single one does because not every single one hits the mark, but they get great comments on LinkedIn and people will follow them to the episodes. That was a big surprise. In the coming year, I’m going to be looking more at how we’re positioning those videos on LinkedIn than I have been. I’m going to be seeing how else we can support our growth over on YouTube.
The production value of our video has not been much of a consideration. What has affected huge dips or spikes in viewership has been our episode titles and descriptions. Share on XThis will crack you up because it will. The thing is, when I listen to the Shorts because we record these quite a few weeks before anything gets posted. By the time that it gets posted, I have slept many times since then so I have forgotten. Often, when it gets posted, it’s like, “That was smart.” I said something small. I’m always surprised. I shouldn’t be surprised because that’s what people are paying me for. It’s to try to say a smart thing but it still continues to surprise me like, “That was smart. That was insightful.”
When I review them, I’m always like, “That was a good clip.” Again, I come from a live stream background, one of the things that I have a hard time with is we speak slower on a show than we would speak if we were doing a live stream than you typically see with Reels. If somebody’s recording a short form video to be delivered as a short form video and yet people listen. People don’t mind slow talking.
That speaks to the fact that a lot of the sound bites that are clipped do resonate with that woman who is hungry for sustainable business success or who is drowning in her business. A lot of times with the clips, it’s the myth busting you do. It’s you being contrary to what accepted fact is or what our mutual friend, Jenny, calls the sacred cows that give spoiled milk. That is compelling. It stops the scroll. It gets them to listen. This is another thing for us. Even if they don’t do anything more than listen to that one clip, it’s still a win because the chances of them stopping their scroll off of a written sentence or two is very unlikely.
One of the things that I haven’t quite done yet but I’ve got some ideas. We’re going to pull our top four most downloaded episodes of the first 52 and we are going to do a deep dive. For episodes 53 to 56, we’re going to do a deep dive into each of those episodes. Before we do that, Gwen, I know a lot of our clients read the episodes. What are some themes that have jumped out that people have mentioned to you about the show that surprised you?
Listener Love: Unpacking Key Themes From Our Audience
You need to go first. I’ve got nothing. I’m trying to think. I would say it’s not necessarily themes per se, but it is that slightly contrary thought. It’s probably the thing that pops up the most where people are like, “You’re right. No one is saying this, but that makes sense what you’re saying.” I’m mostly hearing it from either current clients or past clients.
We only share two clients-ish. My audience doesn’t have a huge overlap with yours but I’m sharing the show with them a lot. They love the show, by the way, but some things that have jumped out for them. First of all, one of our initial episodes on systems blew people’s minds. The systems episode, the accountability episode and the effectiveness episode are the three that got me when I was sharing them with my community, the most emails back. Mainly because you said something in that episode that blew people’s mind, which is that you have systems whether you mean to or not.
I do remember that. That was, “What do you mean I have systems? I don’t have anything documented.” It’s like, “It doesn’t mean you don’t still have a system.”
The idea that systems as a collection of consistent behaviors blew people’s minds, especially in my arena because I’m a marketing professional. I have a lot of people who come to me for marketing advice and they’re trying to market their way out of operations or out of systems. They’re thinking it’s SOPs and a fully integrated tech stack. That idea of they have systems whether they want to admit it or not. That was a big one.
The effectiveness piece like effectiveness versus efficiency. Doing something faster is not necessarily the win. It’s doing something in a way that makes sense and makes an impact. That got me a lot of emails. The accountability piece, which we’ll talk more about in some of our future episodes, but the accountability piece was the idea that accountability didn’t have to come with shame. That was the big one.
You’re right. That’s one that always catches people off guard because so many times their associate accountability often with how they were raised as a child. Training a child is different than accountability. Sometimes, there’s accountability as part of it. I only get to do parenting advice for entertainment purposes only since I didn’t raise any children. Most parents at some point do some amount of shame, whether they mean to or not.
Also, blame. That’s the other thing.
I’m saying that makes them bad parents because I had excellent parents and there was some of that for me, too. I’m not saying that now you’re a bad parent. I think that just happens as part of the parenting process but that’s also the difference of an adult versus a child and how a child perceives the information that’s being shared to them as well. We also tie that into accountability which sometimes is. Sometimes what was happening was accountability but a lot of times it was just parenting, which is different.
Maybe micromanagement. That’s the other piece that we’ve talked a lot about. You can’t hold people accountable without micromanaging every single move that they make.
I do think it’s one of those things that because of what we talked about, it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t necessarily get a lot of feedback about it because a lot of it is, “That resonated. I don’t want to let anyone know that that resonated.”
We do deal a lot in secret shame here.
We do. Not that we are secretly shaming people because that’s not ever what we do but people hold that as like, “I would never want anyone to know that the person who needed to be raising the hand when that was said was me.” That’s okay because that’s part of it. Sometimes we need to process that to realize, “No, that’s okay.”
The Road Ahead: What’s Next For Our Podcast Journey
Now for the big question, Gwen, what are you looking forward to in the next year of podcasting?
I’m looking forward to what we uncover because we don’t have that much planned ahead. We uncover as we go based on what we’re experiencing with our clients, what we’re seeing in our accountability process, what the conversations I’m having and the things that we’re observing both in your sphere and in my sphere. What I’m excited for is what we’re going to uncover and see that we believe needs to be talked about.
That is true because we are highly responsible. Both, you and me are great responders. When people reach out and say, “Have you done an episode on this?” We’re like, “No, but we can because we should and we will.” We can fit that in fairly quickly. The other piece of it is, you tend to see shifts. I will say you tend to smell change on the wind long before anybody else sees shifts in the market. That allows us to have conversations about things that may or may not come to pass. Oftentimes, we’re talking about it and by the time it hits, I’ll call it the airwaves, even though this isn’t radio.
The airwaves in 6 to 8 weeks, other people are just starting to notice it so it feels like the right time and right place. That is true, though. It’s the excitement of what we can uncover in the coming year because I do think the coming year is going to have a lot of different things emerging in business, especially those of us who work online. I’m just going to throw this in here. I don’t care if it sounds desperate. I would really like to see more reviews. I’m just going to throw that out there for anybody. Rate us on Spotify. Leave us an Apple review. I do acknowledge how hard that is. Until I started asking for reviews, I did not realize quite the lift that it is.
Pull out your phone because it’s hard to do them on the computer and do all the things. I appreciate every review we’ve gotten. I also am looking forward to spreading the message because now that we have 52 episodes, we’ve got a good collection of resources that we can send people like when they email us with a question or if they DM you on LinkedIn with a question.
There's no one right way to launch, run, or continue a podcast, but subtle shifts can definitely be made. Share on XWe’ve got answers in sound bites now that we didn’t have before. Before, you would have had to sit there and say, “How do I listen?” Let me just get on a call with you because it would be easier to talk through it than it would be to type it out. Now you can say, “Here’s an episode that we did on the topic and if you want, we could hop on a call to discuss further.”
The other thing you had mentioned and it’ll take some time but we have someone who can help us with this is doing what I’m going to call the backlinking and the link connecting. There are times that we know that we’ve talked about an episode. Later going forward, all of a sudden, it’s like episode 12 should also connect to episode 20 in the forward. Which we couldn’t have done when we put out the show notes for episode 12 because episode 20 didn’t exist yet.
Being able to continue to go both ways and being able to do that on a go forward basis because episode 20 might link back to episode 12, but there’s also a value in someone being able to say, “Oh.” If I want to go deeper, I also need to go forward and find this other episode as well. It’s interesting because we do a good job of talking about new things every time but we do cover related and parallel topics often as well, where it’s like we’re talking about this, but you also want to shift over into this lane and learn this other thing. If this was interesting, you also want to hit this next thing as well because that’s going to be interesting. We talked about so many things. I think that connection piece is going to be an interesting piece going forward.
I’ll bring us to a close because we’re going to be talking a lot about this in the coming weeks. The first year I would say has reinforced one belief that we went into this with just like there’s no one right way to build a business. There’s no one right way to launch a show, run a show or continual show, but there’s definitely ways that you can make some subtle shifts so that what you’re producing, whether it’s your show or your business, align better with who you are and what you want life to look like. Go ahead.
Co-Hosting And Alignment: The Power Of An Unconventional Approach
I was going to say the thing that also strikes me about this is you and I do this as a co-hosted show was something that was not being done much if at all when we launched.
Not in our space.
We’re seeing it more now, which is interesting but that also was being in full alignment. I knew I did better in that interview responding to conversation mode. Could I do the show completely by myself? Absolutely. I have zero doubt about that. I have done lots of talking into the camera by myself and various other things in my past. I could have done that, but I knew that this would be a more dynamic and interesting option. Back to that full alignment that we went ahead and said, “This isn’t the typical way that people are doing the show but we’re going to do with the way that makes sense for us.”
I’m so glad that you brought that up. Our goal with the business, Everyday Effectiveness goal is not to give people a template to follow but to help them think more clearly about what they’re building and why and specific women in business. Women in business are told a long list of what you could have, would have and should have done. Ultimately, our goal is to help every woman understand that she can live the life she wants while building the business she wants so long as she’s clear on what those things are and builds in alignment.
I want to say, readers, we’re grateful that you’ve been part of this journey for us. Whether this is your first episode or your 52nd. We are grateful that you’ve been here. We can’t wait to go deeper in the episodes ahead. Trust me, you’re going to stick around for what’s coming next. Now one of the things that has emerged is we have talked a lot more about burnout. We have found out that everybody talks about burnout.
Burnout ultimately is a consequence of building a business that does not align with your values and with the life that you want to live. We do have a guide and assessment for breaking the burnout cycle. You can find that at TheBusinessYouReallyWant.Com/burnout. Even if that’s not your thing, come back for the next episode. We’ll dig deeper into the topics that have mattered most to our readers. We’ll see you then.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
