Podcasting as a Business Growth Strategy with Nicole Grinnell

When starting a business, there are several key things to consider, like marketing strategies and financial planning. In the early stages, it's crucial to reach a wide audience to make your business known. What are some effective ways to make an impact and connect with potential clients? Join us in this episode with Nicole Grinnel, an entrepreneur, CEO, and podcast host. We discussed the benefits of guesting on podcasts, especially for early-stage businesses for growth and connection, as well as having an entrepreneurial mindset and remote work flexibility, such as virtual assistants. Tune in to gain valuable insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: Podcasting as a Business Growth Strategy with Nicole Grinnell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve advocated quite a bit on this podcast about kind of embracing a new way of thinking and I think one of the things that we’ve often thought about in the past is that when someone is doing something similar to what you’re doing, you see them as a competitor, as someone that’s kind of possibly occupying your space. But there’s a saying that the market’s only saturated when you’re trying to be someone else and it’s not necessarily saturated with you. So, I’m always here to support other people on the same journey, and the journey I’m talking about today is showcasing the stories of people who start their businesses or showcasing the stories of people who follow their passions very much here. So, my guest today, Nicole Grinnell, is the host of Mic'd Up, another podcast, as well as a two-time business founder. --- Nicole, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me, Stephen. I’m excited to be here. Well, thank you so much for popping on. And let’s first start by talking about Mic'd Up. Now, your podcast has been around for quite some time, even longer than this one. Yeah. So we have, obviously, like our actual show, and then we really serve as a booking agency to get other people on podcasts, which is a way that we’ve actually grown multiple businesses and supported a lot of businesses in that effort and so we really want to do much like the purpose of your show is show other ways that businesses can grow through different avenues and what other people have done and that’s what Mic'd Up plans to do. Nice. And so I guess the first question I have for you about that is, if someone is starting a business or trying to get any of their initiatives noticed, and I want to be all inclusive, not every initiative is a business but want to get something noticed, how should someone be thinking about podcasts? I hear people have advocating, say, start your own podcast or try to be on other podcasts. What’s the best way for someone to think through a strategy as far as building their business that involves the podcasting medium? So, it’s funny because I always say there’s a time and place for either of those. It really depends on the stage you’re at in business. So, when you are just starting out and you’re really trying to build your name, build pipelines, build relationships, that’s a great time to be in a guesting space because, really, what happens is the show is all about you. So, I compare it to having someone over for dinner. What’s easier, being the guest or being the host? When you’re the guest, it’s all about you, they’re doing all the prep, the legwork, they’re promoting it, they’re all of this, that’s really what guesting can be. When you’re in the hosting space, that’s a great time for when you are a seasoned entrepreneur, a seasoned professional, business is running, you’ve got some great pipelines and now you’re kind of at that stage that you want to give back and you want to be able to naturally connect. That’s a great time to be a host. So it really depends on that scale that you’re in and what that looks like for you. And with businesses and people that, say, start their own podcast to support their business, do you recommend kind of keeping it to the topic of the business? Because I think I’ve encountered a lot of people who, if your business is about, say, accounting, the podcast is also about accounting. We tell our clients, and this is something that I try to do even with ours, is it’s not a commercial, it’s a connection. So, you’re really there to talk about your background, who you are, the purpose, the why. Of course, your business is going to come up in that but people want to understand who they’re working with, they want to learn from your experiences, they want to resonate with you on something. For instance, a lot of times when I’m doing shows, I’m talking about my entrepreneurial background and growing up in a small business. People will resonate with that. They’ll be like, “I understand that and I know the type of work ethic you’re gonna have having that background.” So, we want to make the connection. We want to really showcase who you are and the purpose of your company and the why of what you do.Share on X And so are you talking exclusively about connecting with the guests that you’re interviewing or are you also talking about connecting with the audience who are listening? Both. So, most of the times when you are going on, the host is having a set audience and what we really do is, with our guests, we try to find those audiences that they want to either develop or further in those pipelines, but the host is almost a representative of that audience. So, making a really good connection with that host that can lead to some great referrals, some really great introductions, that’s really key. But the audience is obviously going to be that passive listener that’s going to get to hear and be like, “You know what, either I have a need for this and I really resonate with this or I know someone that might and let me send them the show and connect them that way,” so it really hits on both fronts. Let’s just take the earlier stage example when you’re saying be a guest when you’re first starting and, say, you have a business and you’ve been a guest on six podcasts, are these interviews oftentimes serving as a good way for someone to introduce their services to customers and say like, “Hey, you wanna know more about my business? Check out, I was on such and such podcast and check out this interview and that’ll give you a good idea about whether or not you wanna consider working with me.” Absolutely. So, the fringe benefits of podcasts I found out very early on, most business owners struggle with, “Okay, how do I market my business? How do I get my message out there? How can I get in front of more audiences?” and podcasts kind of became this one-stop shop. So, I was making great connections with the hosts, obviously, the audience, listeners, but then I had this amazing content that was not only helping my marketing efforts, my SEO, everything was linked back to our website, but I had great content to use in my sales cycle so I could splice that down, and in my world, what that would look like is, “Hey, John, I know we talked about that it’s really hard for you to delegate, I wanted to send you over this show where I talked about great ways for entrepreneurs to delegate.” So, I’ve not only provided a value and an education to a potential client but I’m also establishing myself as that expert and they’re getting to hear in another perspective, of on a show, of really, in my own words, what that would look like. That’s a huge benefit and that’s really something we coach our clients on is this content is gold and you really need to make sure that you’re utilizing it. You said that you started this podcast, did you say eight years ago? Yeah. So I have a staffing company and we worked with a lot of small business owners and they, just like we talked about, they struggled with that. So, about eight years ago, we got into getting people on as guests but we were doing it kind of as this underground service and staffing where we would hear somebody that might need some help and we were like, “You know what, we do this, we can help you out,” and it was just really, really successful. And so I was actually listening to a How I Built This podcast and they were talking about making sure that in your businesses, that your service lines are very clear and they make sense with your purpose and I was like, “This doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense in staffing. Why are we doing this?” So we launched Mic’d Up fully about two years ago. So, we’ve been in this playground and we feel like we’ve grown up in podcasts, but Mic’d Up has been online for about two years now. Starting Mic’d Up, what was your process like getting it from the point of idea to the point of where it’s an actual, tangible entity that’s out there for the world to listen to? Any entrepreneur mind is seeing the gap and then knowing a way to fill it and so what I knew after listening to the show was like, okay, no one knows that I can fill this gap because it doesn’t belong in staffing. Starting a business, honestly, feels very easy to me, I kind of know the mechanics and the operations of getting it up to speed. It’s a lot less capital and work that a lot of people even realize. I mean, you can start with a great idea and build from there. You don’t need to have the full office suite. I always tell people when they’re starting don’t even worry about a business card, just get your first client. So, get a good presence, have your service lines clearly defined, and then go get a client, and everything else will come from there.Share on X So that’s really where we started. We went to our current client base in staffing and said, “Hey, we’re launching this sister company, this is what we do really well, we’ve been doing it for a while, and now you can actually book with us over here.” ...