All the secrets behind the podcast are revealed. Discover how Dave and Stephen came together, where all the stories come from, and if it’s scripted or not.
Dave Young:
Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor which is… Well, it’s us. But we’re highlighting Ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So, here’s one of those.
[Tappers Jewelry Ad]
Stephen Semple:
Hey, it’s Stephen Semple here, and this week we’re doing something a little bit different. We’ve given Dave Young the week off. And instead, I have with me one of our business partners from Atlantic Canada, Matthew Burns. And there’s a number of things that Matt wanted to talk about and share. So, what’s up man? What did you want to talk about?
Matthew Burns:
We’ve been listening to you ramble on about business success for a year and a bit like a year and a half and it’s been incredible to listen to. The problem is, I don’t think your listeners really understand why you’re rambling on about business success outside of there’s… You give lessons, which is great. But why… I’m going to ask you a question. How did you get started with the podcast? And what you mean by that is, where did this idea come from?
Stephen Semple:
I wish I could give a really easy answer to that. But it’s a very multi-step, multi-stepped answer, because it was literally easily a year of exploration before landing on the podcast. So I guess the first part is, why did I want to do podcasting? And frankly, what I wanted to do is, share some of my thoughts, ideas with audience, build relationship with folks, and hopefully build my marketing business.
Matthew Burns:
Quite frankly, you’ve been telling some of these stories to business partners for… All of us have heard you talk about, “Oh man, you guys, did you know about this company, did you know this about this company?” And it backed up a lot of the things that we had been doing. But, I don’t think people understand that about you. How much of a story collector and storyteller you are. Dave says it in the intro, but I don’t think people understand that.
Stephen Semple:
This is a really interesting story. Gary Bernay, one of our other business partners and myself, both met Rick from Pawn Stars. The star of Pawn Stars.
Matthew Burns:
Awesome.
Stephen Semple:
And we were chatting with him and one of the things that he shared was that, one of the hardest parts about doing a television show, and this will lead to the podcast. And one of the hardest parts about doing a television show is, anybody can come up with an idea for a show. But a season is like 20 some odd episodes. And really what a television company wants is, they want this thing to be able to go three or four years. So literally, can you come up with a 100 ideas? And if you can’t come up with a 100 ideas, if this show cannot be done a 100 times, it never makes it as a show. When I got thinking about podcasting and realizing that really what you want to do is, publish at least once a week. At least once a week. If you don’t do once a week, you’re not going to get any traction.
Matthew Burns:
Well yeah, because there’s a lot of podcasts that publish twice a week, but there’s a lot of podcasts that don’t publish monthly.
Stephen Semple:
Right. And you’re just not going to get following and habitual listeners and participation and things along that lines. When I thought about, “Well, you got to do this once a week”, well that means, to go a year, you got to have 50 ideas. So the first question when I was thinking about, “Well, what do I want a podcast”, is I had to find something that I knew I could do 50 times. Because I also felt like, “Well if you could do it 50 times, by the time you go through a year, you should be able to have a bunch more.” So, when it came to these stories about businesses, I just started writing down companies that I hadn’t researched yet, but I knew the story about and I wrote them down. I wrote them down, wrote them down, wrote them down. And it did not take me long until I literally had 40.
Matthew Burns:
Right.
Stephen Semple:
And I went, “Okay. I can come up with an idea every week.” And what’s really interesting is, I still add to that document, because I’ll come to things and I have things that a year and a half later were put on that document before starting I haven’t gotten to yet.
Matthew Burns:
Oh, that’s funny. Yeah. I have all these early ideas, but wait a second. This one’s so cool. Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
Here’s one’s come along and I actually can find some details on it. So for whatever reason, even when I was in high school, I was always interested in business and read business books and business magazines. And I did business as my degree in university and always been fascinated about it. But the thing I wanted to do is, we’ve all heard stories and lessons from companies that are big. “Oh, you know, Apple does things this way, so you should do it this way.” Well, that’s only useful to somebody who’s a CEO of a large company. And the vast majority of us are not that.
Matthew Burns:
What? Come on.
Stephen Semple:
We are. So, what I wanted to do was, talk about the things that these businesses did when they were little because I think that’s a lesson that all of us can apply to our small business, our life, our department that we run. Those lessons are far more usable and those are the stories I wanted to tell. I just want to share those lessons.
Matthew Burns:
Well, and that was going to be my question to you was, you’ve got these awesome stories about companies and how they became empires as you say, but what’s the tying of them together? So how did you come up with tying it to a lesson? That’s thematic. This is the lesson we can learn by these decisions made by Coca-Cola?
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, that was the template. Frankly, an episode doesn’t get created until there’s clarity around a couple of lessons. And I guess first of all, to me that made it a little bit more interesting. Definitely makes it more challenging, but I also think it makes it useful. In other words, if a business owner, an entrepreneur, a busy person is giving me 20 minutes of their time, and if I can distill that down into a lesson that they can use, it’s more valuable. It takes it from being a really interesting entertaining story, which is awesome, to a really interesting entertaining story in which I can apply something to it in my life.
Matthew Burns:
Very smart. Now, I know you gave Dave the week off, but this podcast isn’t a podcast without Dave Young.
Stephen Semple:
True.
Matthew Burns:
I think people want to know why.Why Dave Young? How did you guys connect to do this?
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, sometimes the universe just gives you a signal. So, I had been thinking about doing a podcast and I knew I wanted to do that rather than a written blog, because I’m much more of a speaker than a writer. And there’s a host of other things, podcasts. What I like about it is you can build that regular listenership and engagement and things along that lines. So, I had already kind of decided I wanted to do a podcast and I was already playing around with formats. I already knew I wanted to be a lesson. I already knew I wanted to be 20 minutes long. I was approached by Dave. Dave called me one day, there’s a thing I presented to partners at one of our partner meetings and it was encouraged that I create a video to recap this idea and train this idea to people.
And David reached out to me and he wants some further insight. And I said, “Well, why don’t we just record this conversation and then I’ll just post that to the partner site that becomes my training video.” For me, it was like easy button. And I talk, it’s an internal thing, so I don’t have to edit or anything and I load it up. Job done. Then one day, I’m listening to Roy Williams, our founding partner, and he made a comment on the video. And he said, “Boy, Dave and Steve are so great together. I felt like I was just watching The Tonight Show. There’s this real natural dynamic that was really entertaining. And I went, “That’s how we’re going to do this.” And so I approached Dave and I said, “Dave, do you want to do this?” And Dave was like, “Yeah, that would be cool.”
Matthew Burns:
Okay. So, that’s an [inaudible 00:09:05]
Stephen Semple:
That’s all an accident. An accident.
Matthew Burns:
It’s very serendipitous. So, you’ve got this idea, you want to do a podcast, you’re a story collector, you want to teach lessons and give people real valuable lessons they can use. And these things give powerful punches. And I think that’s what the listeners have been saying. If you read through the comments on Facebook and Instagram and people are responding to it, so that means there’s a lot of prep work. I’m just thinking about, I know you do research. How much is this scripted? How much is this… Because you want a very specific point you want to get across, how much is Dave going like, “Oh no, I want to say this here.” How much did that happen?
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, common question. Really, really common question.
Matthew Burns:
Because it always seems so, “Oh, Stephen just told me we’re going to be talking about blah blah blah. And then he goes right into it and I’m like, “Oh okay, good. He must know.”
Stephen Semple:
So, the first half dozen, we would get together before recording and we record these in clumps. And the first half dozen we would get together and I would give him a couple of minute outline of what it was we’re going to talk about and what the lesson is and a little bit of background on the company, then we would go into the recording and they were good. I don’t know when that switched and it may have even been one of those ones that we just didn’t have time to go through or decide to record an extra one. I can’t even remember what happened that made that happen. But we suddenly did one with no preparation on Dave’s part, where I just said, “We’re recording this.” And we went into it and both of us afterwards, that was so much better. That was just so much better. And in fact, it was even odd because he took it down a few paths that I didn’t even think about.
And we decided after that, that’s how we’re going to do it from now on. Well, and of course Dave was thrilled, because it was less preparation work for Dave. Secretly it was Dave’s plan, all of all.
Matthew Burns:
Yeah, exactly. This worked out according to plan.
Stephen Semple:
It worked out according to plan. And so literally before recording, I’ll just say to Dave, “Hey Dave, what we’re talking about is Warby Parker.” Now the only question he may ask, he may go, “Oh, Warby Parker, the eyeglass people.” I said, “Yeah.” Okay great. And then he takes a minute and he decides what his intro is going to be and the first thing he talks about and we just roll from there. Now, I have my bullet point notes in front of me, in terms of the outline of the story that I want to tell. And we sometimes go off track and I do know the lessons that I want to bring it back to, but that’s the level of scripting that we’re doing on it.
Matthew Burns:
But I was going to say, because the earlier episode… What’s like almost anything, you start doing something new and you’re stiff and robotic and I don’t know what to do. And then all of a sudden it starts to feel more natural. But I remember at one point in me listening to the podcast where I went, “Wow, did they ever enjoy that podcast? The two of you just all of a sudden enjoyed, I could hear it. You could hear laughter, you could hear spontaneity, you could hear it.” It comes across better. They say you can hear a smile over the radio. So, it has to be the same for podcasting. Anyway. Yeah, I can’t tell you the episode. I just remember hearing this elevation in the way you guys produced.
Stephen Semple:
And that was probably the one where that changed. And we just found it was a much better… It was just a much better format. It’s just much… And I think, this is one of the things. If I was going to give recommendations to people who are thinking about doing a podcast or something along those lines, one of them is, make sure that you can come up with a just crap ton of ideas. The other is, be open to discovery in this. It was a discovery that Dave and I format worked. It was a discovery of not doing the preparation, made it better. Be open, try some different things and sort of go, “Oh, that worked really well. That worked really poorly.” There are some episodes that I know at a certain point I’m going to go back and redo, because I was very unhappy with how they turned out and I know why. I will not make that mistake again. Just watch for those things and be open to it. Just be open to observing it.
Matthew Burns:
Perfect. Perfect. Well, that kind of leads us into a thought that I had which was, would you start another podcast? Would you do two? Would you run two of them side by side?
Stephen Semple:
I would be on another podcast. There’s certainly more frequent publishing, certainly helps you in terms of analytics and audience and all of that technical stuff. It’s a lot of extra work. So you got to be prepared for that. I was figuring it out between research and recording and editing and all this other stuff. I’m probably six to eight hours of work into a podcast and I have other people who help me. I don’t do the production, I don’t do the social media posting. You help with the number of things. I don’t do it all. So, that’s great. The disadvantage on podcasts is, if I was going to add something extra to it, I might look at YouTube, just because there’s some advantages to YouTube in terms of building. I think it’s easier to build audience in YouTube, because of the analytics around YouTube helps you a little bit more than podcasts. But, there’s pros and cons. But then there’s more production, a little harder to produce and things along that line. So, everything has pros and cons.
Dave Young:
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Empire Builder Ads]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off. And trust me you haven’t missed a thing.
Matthew Burns:
Podcasting for you was, you went into it wholeheartedly knowing it’s not easy to build out a successful, highly listened to, highly engaged podcast.
Stephen Semple:
Yes. And one of the places you need to start, I believe, first of all, you have to start with committing to it for a year, not worrying about how much your audience builds. I think you have to just commit to that and just hammer through that. I think we saw what the average number of episodes per podcast is something like eight. Most people give up. The second thing is, worry less about whether this will be interesting to other people. Just believe that if this is interesting to you, there’ll be people out there that find it interesting. You have to almost start with scratching your own itch. Because otherwise, I don’t know whether you can maintain, if it’s not something that is super interesting to you, I don’t know whether you can maintain it.
Matthew Burns:
That’s a brilliant segue. I have one question I wrote down that this now helps to answer that specific thing about scratching your own itch. What has been your favorite episode?
Stephen Semple:
My favorite episode is Uncle Nearest. The whiskey. Uncle Nearest whiskey was my favorite episode. Just the journey that Fawn Weaver went on and how she just got sucked down this path by a story that was not her own story. Just to me, that’s my favorite.
Matthew Burns:
That doesn’t surprise me because, story is your thing.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Matthew Burns:
To me that makes perfect sense and it’s really why I think most people listen to your podcast.
Stephen Semple:
And my second favorite, Sleeman’s Ale. So it’s all alcohol. Sea alcohol ones. Sleeman Ale, just again, because of the family. There’s some weird twists in that. Because he was… While it’s the family story, he was adopted and he was the name… There’s just all this extra weirdness that went into it that you were just like, “This is just really cool.” But those would be my favorite ones right now.
Matthew Burns:
Okay. I have two questions left.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Matthew Burns:
What’s the one episode that you would say surprised you, as far as whether… And I don’t care what the surprise is. Whether it was the engagement you got on it, the amount of the strangeness, I don’t care. What was the episode that surprised you?
Stephen Semple:
Still surprises me, Volkswagen. So, we did some shorts to promote Volkswagen. So, these little Ads that were putting on Facebook and what’s been six months ago, and we are still getting people commenting on the Ads.
Matthew Burns:
So I can talk to this, because I am involved, because I do the social media posting and I watch it and it’s incredible to me. And I wouldn’t have thought that one, if I’m honest. I thought Dr. Dr. Brickley had been up there, because he was just a weird crack pot dude. But anyway. So, I guess that’s the one that surprises me the most. But the amount of engagement that we have on social media for a podcast about a bug, about a Volkswagen Beatle and it’s the nostalgia that it brought out in so many people. And it wasn’t the post that got the engagement, it was the advertisement that got the engagement. It’s a weird… You’re right. It’s a weird spot. Okay. So, I think we’ve been on for a little bit here and I definitely want to get to what’s next? Where’s the podcast going? What can your listeners expect next?
Stephen Semple:
Continue doing it. I’m enjoying doing it. Dave’s enjoying doing it. We are at a stage now where audience is really building strong on it, so that’s exciting. There’s lots more stories to tell. Haven’t run out of them. For sure going to continue.
Matthew Burns:
Perfect.
Stephen Semple:
One of the other things that I’m working on, it’s probably going to be about nine months to finish, is I’m creating a book, taking these stories and we’re going to do it as a book. But the thing that we’re going to do that’s fun is, it’s going to be short little chapters. And they’re all going to be written like little ESOP fables.
Matthew Burns:
I’m trying to be the interviewer here. And I guys… I’m talking to the audience now. I got to read the first two. And I know they’re not done, but damn, they’re interesting. It’s weird. You’re weird. People are going to understand exactly what that means until they get your hands on the book when it’s out. And then like he said, it’s going to be a little while, but thank you, because it’s weird. And so it’s interesting and it’s from here, it’s all inspired by this podcast, which is incredible.
Stephen Semple:
And then I’m going to do another comic book.
Matthew Burns:
Oh.
Stephen Semple:
Yes. And going to do it on the power of storytelling. So, basically it’s a comic. For people who don’t know, I did a comic book on how to raise prices. And when we say comic book, I mean comic book.
Matthew Burns:
Oh no. It’s a comic book.
Stephen Semple:
So, going to do one along the same lines and it’s going to be around the power of storytelling and how to create a business story.
Matthew Burns:
Awesome. Just keep putting out content, because there’s some really cool things that we’ve learned over the last little bit from your stuff. I want to say thank you for humoring my idea here to interview you. I think I was jealous. I was behind the scenes working on things and I was like, “No, I got to get on air. How do I do? Okay, let me interview Steve.” But thank you, because I think this is interesting. I think people really needed to understand a little bit about why. And it’s been a long run. This has been a great podcast, so thank you for your time.
Stephen Semple:
The other thing that I’m going to say to people is, we all suffer from our own blind spots. So for example, you were going to talk about Dr. Brinkley. So Dr. Brinkley, people want to go back and listen to, was a story about a doctor during the depression. And I was very hesitant to do it, because he’s a complete quack. He ripped people off. He was a complete charlatan. And I was hesitant to do something about someone who is a charlatan, but there were lessons to be learned there. And when I did it at the time and for the longest time, it was one of our most popular episodes.
Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.
Stephen Semple:
It isn’t any longer, but it carried that for a long time. And another one that’s been really popular was, doing the demise of Eastman, which was suggested by Gary Bernay. And Gary and I did it together and I was hesitant to do that. And it turned out to be really popular. So when you approached me on the idea of this is, let’s give this behind the scenes, I was like, “You know what? Every time I’m hesitant to do it, it turns out great. So, maybe I should just stop being hesitant and just go, “Yeah, let’s do that.”
Matthew Burns:
That’s it. Give the audience what they want. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it and I look forward to the next 100 episodes.
Stephen Semple:
It’s going to be a fun ride. There’s lots of stories still to tell.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions at theempirebuilderspodcast.com.
