Brigitte Lyons: how she built, closed and sold Podcast Ally

Full transcript

Edited for reading. Select a time to play the audio from that point.

Who Brigitte is (00:00)

Brigitte: I’m Brigitte Lyons, and I worked with Alex. The way he knows me is that I was running what I called a PR agency, but it was more PR consulting. I really wanted to create a productized agency around the podcast booking services that I had sort of stumbled onto. I’d been one of the pioneers in the space. So I wanted to systematize the approach, build a team and create a company that I could maybe exit someday. But definitely, at the time, I wanted a company where I could travel full time.

Gosh, that was five years ago. Since that time I built up the company, weirdly closed it, then sold it, which is so backwards, I know. And now I’m not traveling full time anymore. I am housebound. I’m doing what I would call management coaching and consulting for small agency founders who suddenly found themselves leading teams and not knowing what to do, because that’s my journey. I’m sure we’ll talk about that a lot.

Alex: I love it.

Writing on Substack and trusting your own process (01:05)

Alex: I think you’re shortchanging yourself in one regard, which is that you’re also writing some interesting stuff on Substack. The last article you wrote was so good that I pledged. I made a pledge. I subscribed.

Brigitte: I don’t have pledges turned on, because it’s too much pressure, but I thought it was so nice.

Alex: When I make a pledge, I always stack it up next to the equivalent dollar amount in another form of entertainment. The equivalent might be half a Netflix subscription or something. So I’m like, this is that good. How frequently are you writing at the moment?

Brigitte: It comes in bursts. I’ll write a couple of bigger, meatier pieces in a month, then maybe take a month off, then write a couple more. I’m not pushing myself to do a weekly schedule, because I think of these as long form, almost essays more than blog posts. They take a little more time to write, think through and research.

Alex: I think having the schedule can also hamper creativity a little bit. When you’re on deadline and you’ve got to get something out, that pressure sometimes doesn’t allow the ideas to surface themselves.

Brigitte: Yeah. One of my life lessons about work is that I have to trust my own process. No, you’re not in fact lazy, and your procrastination usually has a purpose. When I’m writing, there’s a lot of going back, tweaking and rewriting, especially with a bigger piece. It’s how I surface the holes in my own arguments as I go. If I try to rush that process, I put things out that are half baked. I’m not writing “five ways to” kind of pieces of content, and it takes a little more time to let that simmer.

Publishing, LinkedIn and narrating your own life (03:15)

Alex: If you publish something that you’re not comfortable with, will you post it and then pull it back? Do you do that?

Brigitte: I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I have edited things a little bit when they’re live. I don’t think I’ve ever taken something down.

Alex: I do it about once a week. It’s a habit I’ve gotten into. I’m like, all right, I’m really going to push the envelope with this one. I publish it late at night, I wake up the next morning and I’m like, oh, I don’t know about that one.

Brigitte: Where are you posting these things? I don’t even think I know.

Alex: I’ve been on LinkedIn a bit. And LinkedIn, my goodness. To me it’s quite noisy. There are a lot of folks following particular formulas, and I feel like I got a bit distracted. I’ve seen some posts I’ve created do really well in terms of impressions, and then I’m like, oh, it’s so dopamine enriching to get some impressions, I’m going to chase that. But that stuff is usually pretty vapid. It’s someone else’s idea and I’m just quoting Brian Chesky or something. It’s a bit of a slippery slope.

Brigitte: I struggle, because social media and the blogging feedback loop are really bad for my mental health. Before I started my first business, I was blogging on the side while working at a PR agency. That’s how I formed all the relationships and the contacts to launch a business. Those were the days when Twitter was young. I have best friends that I met on Twitter. Oh my God, I feel so old saying that now. You would guest blog on other people’s sites, and sometimes they’d even pay you for it.

Alex: That’s right.

Brigitte: So I came up that way. And what I found wasn’t even a dopamine hit. It was walking around my day narrating my life as though it was going to be a piece of content, as I was living it. Do you ever do that?

Alex: I’m going to start doing it, and in a Morgan Freeman voice as well.

Brigitte: I just found that I couldn’t live my life and turn it into lessons in a healthy way.

Two and a half years in a fiberglass trailer (05:45)

Brigitte: When I went out in the trailer, so many people said, “Why don’t you do YouTube? Why don’t you blog about this? We want to follow along.” In case this actually goes up, for people listening: I lived for two and a half years in a fiberglass trailer. I like to call it van life with a bonus truck. It was mostly off grid. We had solar panels, we took showers outside sometimes, that sort of thing. And I was running my agency while doing this.

People were like, “You need to put this on YouTube,” not realizing how much work something like that is in itself. I couldn’t run an agency and have a YouTube channel about traveling and running an agency. But the other part is that I just wanted to live my life. I was hiking, and oh my God, I spent so much time in a hammock. I didn’t want to have that narration of what I was doing while I was doing it. Although maybe for Morgan Freeman I would have enjoyed it.

The deal she made with her husband at 25 (06:40)

Alex: OK, let’s jump into that. I think it was 2018 or 2019-ish when we connected. Everyone comes to me with very different goals, and I’m always fascinated by what people’s goals are. Yours was along the lines of: I want to live in a van. I want to travel in national parks. Talk to me about that goal, and how the business was intended to support it. You have an agency background and you’ve had your hands in a lot of stuff. Let’s take it from there.

Brigitte: I got into the location independent movement really early. Again, so old. I was at the first World Domination Summit, if you know what that is, the very first year it was put on. For the first five years I was really into that community, and I really wanted to have this location independent laptop lifestyle, as they say.

I was working in an agency. I was married, and my husband was working a banking job, a corporate job. And we made a deal, because I really hated working in an agency. I really hated my job. I said, “I’m going to pursue starting my own business, and you’re going to do your banking thing as long as you like it. Then I’ll have a business that can support us traveling full time when you’re ready to take a break from that.” That was our deal. We made it at around 25 years old, and it took a decade, more than a decade, for him to say, “You know what? I’m burnt out. I need a break.”

At that point I had been freelancing for quite a long time. I had left agency life behind long before and had been building up an income. So when you and I worked together, I was really at this pivotal transition point where it’s like, this is real, this is happening, but too much of what I’m doing relies on me being on calls. I was doing 90-minute discovery calls at the beginning of every project. If anybody runs a creative, marketing, PR or ad agency, whatever, it’s kind of common. You’re in these deep calls, getting people’s thought leadership out of them so you can transfer it into the work.

And I was like, if I’m going to do this off-grid thing, I can’t be available like that. I’m going to have times where, for six hours on a Tuesday, I’m driving across Nevada with absolutely no cell service. Or I’m going to be camped out on public lands. In the US it’s called Bureau of Land Management, BLM. It’s public land, and there’s a lot of it out West. Sometimes there’s a cell tower you can even see, so you have some reception to get internet with, but it’s not always reliable. And your uploads are really bad, so your video is bad.

So I was like, it can’t be me. And I didn’t know how to make that piece of it happen. I’d hired people before, and they’d worked with clients before. But I was always involved in what I thought was this really critical upfront part: the strategy, setting the direction for the clients, getting to know their work, and then handing it off once the plan was done. I had to figure out how to get myself out of the process, so I could get my part of the bargain that we’d been building toward for 10 years.

What breaks at 20, 50 or 100 clients (10:30)

Alex: Interesting constraints. Connectivity as a constraint, video quality as a constraint. That really forces you to think through what the model is. So what had to change for you to go from being in the mix, in the weeds, getting on these calls, doing the song and dance upfront, all the stuff you needed to do to create the value you were creating? What had to change?

Brigitte: I remember we did this exercise, Alex, so early on. The question you asked me was, “What breaks when you have 20 clients, or 50 clients, or 100 clients?” And I was like, the entire model. Everything breaks. What are you talking about? That was a devastating question for me.

And that was really what it was, because the thing that broke was me. I had been working with three or four clients at a time on these deep-dive projects. I was doing people’s book launches, maybe doing some PR around that. So I could deep dive with them, get to know them really well and construct the plan. Then I had an assistant I’d trained up who was doing the pitching, and I would hand that off, but I had a lot of oversight of them too. And I was doing all the client calls.

So I couldn’t do any client calls. That was one of the constraints I made. I basically said, you are the salesperson, because I’m quite good at sales calls. And I just think when you’re starting a new business, it’s hard. I don’t think offloading sales is a good idea at the start. So I was going to hold on to the sales calls. I was going to hold on to the marketing, because I’d been doing that. And I was going to do the team building. I was not going to do any client relationship management or project management at all. The only thing I would be doing was training and enabling the team to do that, and then reviewing their plans. We did a lot of async work that way. So everything about how I engaged with clients once they signed had to be rethought.

The first thing she let go of (12:48)

Alex: Do you remember the first thing that you let go of?

Brigitte: Is this a trick question? Do I remember the first thing I let go of?

Alex: The reason I ask is that it’s such a big hurdle. It really is. I’m sure you see this with the advisory work you do. You’re all singing, all dancing, doing all of the things in a consulting business. Then there’s a part where you have to say, OK, I’m not going to do that, and you’ve got to let it go. There’s a process behind that, I think.

Brigitte: I was in a really good position, because I had hired somebody as an intern who had been working with me up to this point. I’d trained her for a year, if not more, and she was really quite skillful. I might even have had another person at this time. So handing off wasn’t quite as hard, because I wasn’t hiring people brand new.

Another weird quirk of mine, and I don’t know if I would recommend this, is that I always hired account people. I never hired back-end support people. Whenever I hired, it was people working with clients in some capacity. So I was kind of comfortable with that. I always wanted the people I hired to be revenue generating.

The big thing I remember having to confront was the onboarding process. That 90-minute call where you’ve paid us, we’ve started working, and it’s our big kickoff call where we get to know you. I spent a lot of time thinking about the way to do that call. Was it putting somebody else in the same situation, just swapping me out for the person who worked for me? Or was it reimagining the call?

I decided we were going to trial doing more of an intake form, where somebody would fill out a doc. If we had questions, we’d go back to them. And that’s what we ended up doing. So it went from me leading a call, not to handing the call over to somebody else, but to an intake form.

Down the line, I found there was something missing. The clients couldn’t always answer the questions the way I needed them to without somebody there to prompt them. So I added a private podcast. The intake form was in three parts, because I had developed the sales process where I said, there are three things we need from you to make a successful podcast outreach program. The intake corresponded to each of those elements. And I had a private podcast of quick three, four, five-minute episodes that explained the different parts and why I was asking. So it was: listen to this episode, then fill out this section. It was interactive in that way, but nobody was required to be there live. Then it would go to their account lead, who would review it and follow up with any questions they needed to.

I think that was actually one of the first things I worked on, even though it was the hardest, because it was a non-negotiable. It was the one where, if I can’t crack this, this whole thing won’t work.

Run a small experiment (16:15)

Alex: I love it. You productized yourself. You took that thing you were doing, sat with it and said, OK, I need this information to make this a successful engagement. I love the visual of that. You’re so used to having your arms wrapped around it. I bring them in, I get them fired up, we talk about some stuff, I do all of this busy work behind the scenes, and then somehow I magically come up with this plan. But you put up this boundary, which is: here’s what I need from you. You go and do the work, bring it back to me, and then we’ve got a good input to start.

Brigitte: Yeah. And I will tell you, when I did this, I didn’t think it was going to work. I put it out there anyway. I feel like this is your influence: just do it. You just do the thing. I really did not believe that this was going to work and that we were going to get good results. But I really do have a belief that in a business you should try experiments. And it’s not that big of a deal. Oh my God, we get so in our heads about it. “We have this process and we can’t change it.” Do a small experiment. Take 10% of your clients and do it this other way.

And I told people up front that I was changing the way I do things. Oh my gosh, it’s all coming back. The first few clients, I told them I was changing my process. I said, “Would you prefer that I do this in a call with you? Or would you mind filling it out in this document form?” I gave them the option up front, until I was sure that the document would work. So they were consenting to it. They knew what they were in for. It was no big deal for anyone. And it worked great.

Alex: I think process is safety in some regard. You’ve got this thing that works, and you’ve worked really hard to get to the place where something is actually working, because there’s a lot of trial and error to get there. Then you introduce something new. I get the emotional piece of this, all the inertia that’s created. But at the same time, yes, that’s all true, and what’s the worst thing that could happen if you change it? The worst thing is that someone doesn’t want to do it. And in your case, you’ve got the backup, the process you already had. So you can still get the outcome and the result. It’s a nice way to manage the risk, and to keep the thing moving.

The beta offer and a two-week turnaround (18:45)

Alex: Now, that was the first step. Talk me through where you grew from there. How did things progress? This will probably go on a bit of an adventure around the park, so to speak.

Brigitte: In the program, you had us do a quick and dirty sales page, right? You put out an offer. I don’t remember if we all did this, but I presented it to people in my network as a beta offer. I still remember the spreadsheet you had us fill in. How many people did you reach out to? How many calls have you booked?

So I went through that process. I ended up signing, I think, just three people from my network for this initial offer. It was a six-month program that we started with, at an insane rate where I was losing money. What was wrong with my brain? But whatever. That was in 2019. I signed up these people and I trialed them through the process. At this time I’m sure I still had clients ongoing from the work I had been doing, so it wasn’t like they were my only three clients.

We took these three clients through the process. They did the onboarding the way I said they would. It was very systematized, productized from start to finish. What I ended up coming out with is this. When you came to work with us, it was a creative output, right? We were building pitches for people. We were booking them onto podcast interviews. But the deliverables were really consistent, and so was the timeline.

You come in and you get onboarded through this process. Within two weeks, you get a program back from your account lead. That was a real strict guideline: we had a turnaround time of two weeks to present to the client. I made the choice that our clients would review the pitches, because we weren’t meeting with them, so I wanted to make sure everything was correct. They would review their pitches and give us any tweaks. We’d work through that with them. Then the team would start reaching out to podcasts on their behalf.

Two good interviews a month, tracked in Airtable (20:50)

Brigitte: I had already been working in this space, so I also developed a cadence for how many pitches we would do for folks each month. That was something we reported on. A lot of my folks ended up dividing it and doing it weekly, but that wasn’t a requirement. It was: each month you have these targets and benchmarks to get to.

I based them on a client I’d had before, who was such a specific client avatar. This was a risky decision, but it turned out to be a great one. When she came to me, she had said, “I don’t have a ton of time for PR. I just want a couple of really high-quality interviews. I don’t want you booking me on 10 podcasts every month that have no listeners. I’d rather have two good ones.” So that was our model, and that’s what I told people. I said, “We’re going to try to get you two or three really good interviews every month. Just because they’re booked in a month doesn’t mean they’re going to happen that month.” I ended up having to do a lot of education on timelines.

Because I had data, I knew how many pitches we had to send out to make that happen. Let’s say we wanted to book you on two interviews, and generally we need to send out 20 pitches. The team had this whole dashboard that I built in Airtable, where they would pick out who they were pitching and log them. There were check marks if things went out and if things were booked. Then we could track the data over time, over the years, to see how everything was working, and report that back to the client.

No Slack, few meetings and a 2am dashboard (22:35)

Brigitte: Everything became like this. Actually, by the end my team members would complain to me and say they wished we had more meetings, because everything was asynchronous.

Alex: Who on earth has ever had that problem, by the way?

Brigitte: That’s the pendulum swinging from “I need to be in everything”. It was: if something is on fire, call me. Otherwise, I’m going to be in the desert. They were begging me for Slack, and I would say, “Here’s why we don’t do Slack. If you can make a case for it, I’ll implement it.” No one ever did. We never had Slack.

Alex: Whoa, whoa, Brigitte. You took it to the next level. That’s a massive transition. That’s huge.

Brigitte: I did do one-to-ones. I did weekly one-to-ones with every single team member. And we did a staff meeting. But other than that, no meetings. It was all very much: you put it in the database and it spits out a report.

The other issue I had was, how do I manage my own anxiety as the owner, as a person who has a reputation of my own, built up over a decade now? I had so much anxiety that my team wouldn’t handle those relationships with the same kind of care, or wouldn’t get the results, all of that. I think starting up in a space you already work in is kind of hard, because you already have this emotional connection and reputation.

So I had created this dashboard for me too. If I woke up at two in the morning with anxiety about how a client was doing, I could just pull up this dashboard and see, in real time: this many pitches were called for at this point, this is how many they’ve actually had. This is how many interviews I would have expected, this is how many they had. I could check in real time across any of our clients, see how they were doing and dig into it. That was a big piece of it too: what kind of reporting and information did I need to feel like I could actually be so unreachable, to be honest?

Alex: Well, it’s peace of mind, really. You don’t know when you’re going to need that reinforcement. But if you’re up at 2am sweating it, it’s almost part sleeping pill. You’re like, OK, things are where they need to be. I can get some more sleep now.

Brigitte: Have you ever done that? Bolted awake and been like, oh my God, did this happen? I have insomnia problems, so that might be a personal problem.

Alex: In the early days of WP Curve, I couldn’t turn my mind off it. There was only so much I could physically push. I’d get physically tired, but my brain would still be running at night. So I’d wake up in the wee hours of the morning, write out a bunch of stuff and go back to sleep. Then I’d wake up again, write out a bunch of stuff and go back to sleep. It’s common between us. I don’t know if everybody else has that.

Launching in December 2019 (25:50)

Alex: All right. So you went full systematized. Now, the trajectory of the business. How did that track? It sounded like the process was set and steady and it started to go pretty well.

Brigitte: Well, my beta project with my first clients came to an end, and I sold my first full-on clients and launched the business in December of 2019. So right before the pandemic shut everything down. So, you know, it went great. It was fantastic.

Alex: Your tone says so much more than your words.

Brigitte: It was amazing. That was super fun for me.

Alex: I’m with you.

Brigitte: That’s also the time when we were hitting the road. This whole time I was in the beta, I was renting an apartment in North Carolina. Then we let go of our lease. We had put a deposit down on this trailer, my husband and I, up in Canada. They make it for you. We sold our Subaru and bought a pickup truck, because you can’t tow with a Subaru. All of this happened in December of 2019. I think I was lucky, because if we had waited, we wouldn’t have been able to afford a truck and a trailer. We were supposed to pick the trailer up in April, and the whole world shut down.

So I’d gone out and hard launched the business. I would have to look up how many clients I had, but I think it was around six. It was some people re-signing from the beta trial and some new people. I’d picked up a few clients and had two people working for me, one full time and one part time. The full-time person had been with me for a while. Everything was going really great.

Letting clients out of their contracts (28:00)

Brigitte: And then everything shut down with the pandemic. I’m a bleeding heart, right? So I emailed my clients and said, “I know things are really hard for you. If you want out of your contracts, let me know.” A couple of people did that.

Alex: Let’s pause on that. A bit of background: I’ve stalked everyone. I’ve kept my eye on everyone to see how they’re going. I can’t help it. I’m just interested. It’s so cool to see people progress, or not progress, or whatever happens. I’m just so proud.

So I was digging around on you and I saw this article. I think you did an interview with a woman. I can’t remember her name. The blog post talks about how, when COVID hit, you almost immediately reached out to clients and said, “Hey, if you want to opt out and get a refund…” Were you doing annual plans, or something like that?

Brigitte: Yeah. At that time people could sign up for either four months or a year. They paid monthly, but they were under contract for the full amount.

Alex: Practically speaking, on the enforceability of that: if someone wanted to back out, you’d go to small claims court or arbitration, or do something to get that money back. That’s one side of the pendulum. You were on the other side, which is: I get it, it’s difficult now, you have an opt-out if you want it.

I have to commend you, because there are so, so few people I know who would do that. I could count them on one hand. This is what happens in a crisis, I think. Everyone constricts. They grab on and hold on for dear life. It gets very “me, me, I’ve got to look after myself and cover my back”.

I read that and I had a moment. I was like, good grief. How difficult that must have been for you. You’re looking at your goal, it’s right there. And you’re asking, what’s the thing for me to do that feels right? Endless kudos. I was so proud. I was like, what a human being. Holy shit. That’s amazing.

Brigitte: Thank you. Sometimes I’m like, am I just a sucker? But being in integrity with my own values is my number one thing in life. Whenever I don’t know what to do, I always know the right thing to do. And I just try. It’s hard.

Alex: It’s a very difficult thing to do. We’re talking about an environment that’s upside down. Panic, strife. People don’t know what’s happening. The economy’s shutting down. People are getting sick. The natural instinct is to grasp on, hang on for dear life and see what you can get. I look at that in a broader sense and I think there’s a level of faith or trust that’s working with you.

If anyone listening takes away anything from this podcast: how you respond to a moment of crisis is how you get to know yourself as an entrepreneur, in my opinion. These things will surface. You’ve got a really difficult decision to make, and your judgment and your decision may not wash with everyone else. Maybe 95% or 98% of people wouldn’t do it. But you’ve got to back your conviction, and you own the responsibility and the consequences. I was blown away by that. I was so impressed. So, well done.

Keeping the team and not paying herself (32:05)

Brigitte: Thank you. And I was lucky. Only a couple of people really took me up on it at the time. But it was rough.

I always keep savings, an emergency fund for the business, just like I keep one in my personal finances. So when I did that, I also made the decision that I was going to hold on to the team members I had. The way I saw it was: we don’t know what’s happening, and I have folks who are trained up. I had enough runway to make it through July. I was like, I can keep payroll and keep everything going through July. Let’s just do that, and we’ll see what happens.

And I stopped paying myself. I was paying everybody else. When we talk about lessons learned, Jesus. I was always like, just don’t pay yourself, pay everyone else, it’ll work out. That’s something I’ve stopped doing. But at that time I did make that choice, because I thought, if this starts growing again, this is a good model. I’m really excited. I’m finally doing the thing. I felt really good about what we were doing, and about the reaction I was getting when I told people what I was doing. So that was a choice I made.

Sometimes I joke that I’m a super manifester, but the things I ask for are too small. I always make the goals I set for myself happen, but they’re always really realistic. So of course, on July 1st or June 30th, we get a client. That’s when things start. It’s like, why couldn’t I have said May or something? It’s a blessing and a curse.

Alex: I mean, you get it done, and you don’t go 10 or 20% over. You’re right on the money. I can relate. I’m with you.

There is some benefit in setting goals that are realistic. I need to have conviction that I can accomplish the thing that’s out there, the longer-term goal. If I can’t logically convince myself, there’s no way I can go through the emotional ups and downs of trying to run through walls to get there. Some sort of dissonance comes up. You start working on it and you’re like, hmm, it’s not really that realistic. Oh, maybe. And you get into no man’s land. You don’t take forward action. You don’t take backward action. You just start analyzing and thinking about alternatives. It’s a trap.

Brigitte: There’s a saying, and I don’t know where I heard it: you can’t outrun your nervous system. Did you say that? I’ve heard it somewhere and it sticks with me.

Alex: I don’t know if I did. If I did, I’ll claim it, but it’s probably not mine either. That’s a good one. I like it.

From six clients to 20 (35:20)

Brigitte: OK. So I stop paying myself, we hold on to our clients and we do the work. And then in July of 2020, things start taking off. The way I remember that time, from July to December of that year, is that it was like riding a wild stallion and holding on for dear life. Things grew. We went from the six clients we started the year with, down, and then up to 20 by the end of the year. That doesn’t necessarily seem like a lot of growth, right? But when you’re used to working with four people or so, that’s a lot to handle.

Alex: Just on that point, six to 20. How did you feel through that window of time? Was 20 the target? Was that where you were driving towards? Did you hit that target on the nose?

Brigitte: That’s a good question. I do feel like that was a number in my head that would have felt amazing. Like, oh my God, this is really working.

And it was so much growth because of what happened in COVID. People pulled back. They were like, OK, let’s pull back and figure out what’s going on. We’re not doing anything. And then, because what I was doing was all remote, it was replacing people’s marketing and networking. Instead of going to a conference, you’d go onto a podcast. Any in-person networking was replaced. So people were showing up to sales calls and I didn’t have to sell anything. They knew what they wanted. It was just, is it me or someone else? That was an amazing moment.

The capacity lesson (37:15)

Brigitte: But it was also a big challenge, because I hadn’t been paying myself and I wanted to make it up. I didn’t want to hire, and I didn’t want to spend any money. It’s funny, because I’d had the opposite instinct in the beginning. But at that point the team was really burning out and maxing out, and I just wouldn’t do anything about it. I wouldn’t hire. I know. I know it was bad.

Alex: It makes sense. It’s reflexive, right? You’ve gone from famine to feast, and you’re still in famine mentality.

Brigitte: Well, and I thought it would just dry up. I didn’t think it would keep going. If there’s one thing I did wrong in this whole business, it’s that I restricted our growth at that moment.

The next year I had a team member flame out pretty spectacularly. She left in a pretty spectacular way. And I decided to stabilize the business by taking a pause on new clients, and hiring and onboarding people. This was the next spring into the summer. Summer was historically a slow period for us anyway, so I was like, I’m going to take this time to bring people on.

That was the last time I had to learn this capacity lesson, which I have learned so many times in entrepreneurship: you always need more capacity. You cannot ever allow yourself to hit the ceiling. Gosh, I have run up against that so many times, and it took the experience of that growth to really get it.

Alex: Let’s dig into it. That’s a good one. It’s the opposite way to think from when you’re starting out, which is begging and borrowing (not stealing, we don’t steal) to get clients. Then you’re like, OK, do I have something? Is this real? Is it legit? At some point, hopefully, something goes off and you go, wow, this is a real thing. I have a business and this can scale.

But then you’re in a different zone. Growth happens, and you’re hanging on to growth. You used the metaphor of riding a wild stallion and hanging on to it. The challenge is that you’ve still got to guide it and steer it.

You have to keep marketing (39:55)

Brigitte: Yeah. And you’ve got to keep marketing, which I didn’t do.

Alex: Is that because you got pulled in?

Brigitte: Things flatlined later, because I let all the steam out of the engine at that point.

I did have a lot of success telling people, “We’re at capacity, but we can bring you on in a couple of months,” and I would take a deposit. That worked. When I work with people now and they ask, “Can we do a wait list?”, I’m like, yes. People would say all the time, “This works better for me anyway, because I need time to clear out space to do this.” And I would give them the onboarding ahead of time. I’d say, “You can do all the onboarding. Take as long as you want.” So they had something to do. I can’t think of one person who ever backed out in that timeframe. It was no problem.

So it wasn’t like I completely shut everything down. But I let some steam out of our growth, and we never hit that full mark again. I was running the team and running the business, and I wasn’t marketing enough. That COVID bubble of demand we had eventually popped, about a year later. I had spent so much time first dealing with all that demand and not satisfying it, and then working with the team and not doing enough marketing, that things just slowed down.

Training hires, and hiring in pairs (41:28)

Alex: Did you find yourself getting pulled back into the system and the process? Is that what was taking up your time, or where was your time getting used?

Brigitte: No. What I was working in was a new industry, so when I hired people I had to do a lot of intensive training up front. If you worked in public relations and did other kinds of media outreach, you usually didn’t approach podcasts in the right way. The kinds of things traditional PR people do for media don’t work with podcasts.

So I found myself often hiring people who worked inside podcasts, people who were podcast producers or bookers. I would hire them because they understood what it was like to get pitches, and then train them on how to do the pitch process. So I wasn’t getting dragged into client delivery, but I was spending a lot of time developing training materials up front.

I did a big hiring batch in the spring. Now we’re in 2021. And then we kept growing, actually. I hired two people then, and I hired two more people in the fall. Hiring people in pairs is the best, by the way. It’s so much more efficient than hiring one at a time. Oh my gosh. So that worked really well.

Why she never did the marketing (42:55)

Brigitte: But what do I say? The truth of it is, I didn’t want to market, and I never hired a marketing person. If you want to know what the real problem was, it’s that I just didn’t want to do the work of the marketing, and I never put money into giving it to somebody else. I think things probably would have been fine if I had just hired a part-time person to turn my podcast interviews into blog posts and do all those things. And I never did.

Alex: Was there something about marketing that you didn’t enjoy? Can we dig into that a little bit? This is useful. I hope this is helpful for other people.

Brigitte: What do I want to say about this? Something I’ve recently come to realize is that I’m very good at writing, and at this: giving an interview, teaching content. And I’m very, very strong if I know what I’m selling. Our close rate was incredible. Through the history of the company, most of our clients signed on for a year after one meeting with me, like the next day. We had clients come from SEO and do that. So I can do both of those things.

But marketing is the bridging of the gap. It’s the sales page. It’s the sales webinar, or whatever. It’s getting people from this “I’m interested” thing over here into that call, and I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think I really realized that it’s a different skill set, or that it was a skill set I was missing. I knew that I don’t like writing landing pages and stuff. I never did any ads, because I just didn’t want to do all that stuff. And I’m kind of terrible at it when I do it. Did I answer your question? Maybe I didn’t.

Alex: I would argue that you’re a smart cookie, so you can figure these things out. When you sit down to do marketing stuff, what happens? Are you like, oh, I’ll go towards something I’m more interested in? Or, we’ve got enough in the pipeline that I can close a couple more and make up the difference, and push this down the road six weeks?

Brigitte: Well, one, it’s boring to me. Writing something where you already know the answer is painful for me. That’s the kind of writing you have to do for SEO, and the kind you have to do on a sales page. The essay you talked about was kind of a book review, kind of a case study. When I sat down to write that, I didn’t know where I was going to end up. That’s probably why it took so long. I was thinking something through in the process. But when you’re marketing something, you already know where you’re going. So there’s that. I think it’s just boring.

The other part is that I want to teach. I want to tell people. I used to do webinars, and I liked doing them. People would show up, I’d talk to them later and they’d say, “Oh my God, thank you so much. After your webinar, I went and launched my own program.” They never hired me, because I would give away too much. I just never learned where the balance is. How do you create a lead magnet, a freebie, that gives a person enough information to trust you and commit, without giving them so much information? I’ve never figured that out. I don’t know how to do it.

Sales, accountability and Bootstrapped Giants (47:10)

Alex: I think that’s a function of budget, and I think it’s a function of stage. And I suck at sales. I’m the worst at sales. I was so lucky to have Jake back in the day, because Jake is good at sales, good at marketing, good at this stuff. I always sucked at it. The reason I’m asking some of these questions is that I’m reflecting back on some of my own weaknesses.

There’s a program that Andrew Warner from Mixergy is doing, called Bootstrapped Giants. It’s B2B sales, and they do mutual intros. It’s basically a sales process. They set you up with the scripts, the templates, the tracking and all that stuff. In the same way that you’re smart enough to do marketing, I’m smart enough to figure out sales. But there’s something in me that blocks me from it.

They’ve got a $5,000 program, and I’m like, how much am I going to procrastinate on this thing? Is that going to get me across the divide? They also have an entry-level product, which is probably about 80% of their process. I’m chipping through it and understanding it, and it’s making me slightly uncomfortable. You’ve got to go out to your network, target someone and say, “Hey, can you make an introduction to this person?” And then you do a pitch, which is difficult. It doesn’t come naturally to me.

So the way I think about it is this. They offer 80% of the process. Some people will fill in that gap and do the work themselves, because they want the outcome enough. Others pay someone to help them implement it and whip them to do it. That’s the middle spot. If you’re giving people 90, 95, 99% of the process, there’s some secret sauce you can pull back on a little bit.

But with that program, I think it’s really the accountability. Andrew and Jesse and these guys are well respected. They get on calls with you, and you don’t want to let them down. That’s what pushes it forward.

A model you can’t put into an ad (49:35)

Brigitte: Totally. People would ask me a lot, “How did you get clients? How did you grow Podcast Ally?” And I’d say, you can’t look at what I’m doing now. I had invested so many years in relationship building and marketing before this that I was just resting on the network I had. If we had openings, I would send out an email and say, “Hey, this spring we’re going to have a couple of openings. Does anyone want to take one?” I’d usually get a couple of calls, and I’d usually book both of those calls. So I was enabled to be lazy in that way. But I think it’s a problem.

One thing I’m thinking about now, with what I want to do next, is one of the issues with my model. I would say the issue with my model. With my business, the way we worked with people, I couldn’t put a clean ad targeting group together. The things I was looking for were these: you had to have a really great story, a kind of case study, a before and after, to bring to the podcast. You had to have good relationships already. There were these intangibles, and you can’t put that into Facebook. Facebook’s a little different now, I think, but then it was more interest targeting, a real deep dive. It wasn’t an easy thing to create a marketing bucket for.

Now I want to do another business, and I think about that a lot. I want to create something where I can have forms of lead gen that aren’t just based on meeting a person and asking, are the vibes there? Do they have charisma? Do they have a good story?

Because I would turn people away on sales calls. I think the reason I was good at sales is that it was a real consultation. On that call I was really trying to figure out whether we could have success for you. It wasn’t just, come on and I’ll sign you up. I’d have people yell at me, or send me nasty emails afterwards, telling me how much they wanted to work with me, even though I’d said we couldn’t do it for one reason or another. Man, it would have been a lot easier for me if I didn’t have these criteria. Another constraint. I made my life harder than it needed to be.

Alex: But was there any pattern in the category of people you were working with? Or was it all so broad that there wasn’t a classification you could bucket people into and target?

Brigitte: You’re forgetting my first constraint, which is that I didn’t want a lot of calls. I could have targeted people. We did a lot of work in wellness. We had some big health and wellness influencers that we worked with. So I could have targeted people in that space. But I think I also would have increased my volume of sales calls, which would have been untenable for me. That was a really big one for me: not having a lot of meetings on the calendar.

Oh man. I’m telling you all my… this is rough, Alex. I don’t like this. Move on.

Alex: Hey, what did you expect? This is usually how it goes when we chat.

Brigitte: I told myself, you need to not tell everything. But here I am.

Alex: I lean on that a little bit. I’ll tell you what, I’ve recorded a couple of these podcasts now, and this happened with Jake when I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago. After the fact he said, “Hey, can you just take that bit out?” We were just vibing and chatting, and then you realize, oh shit, I said a bit too much there, I might pull that back. So if there’s anything you need chopped out after the fact, tell me. But I take licence with that, because we do have trust. And I kind of know where to look. I’ve got a bit of a radar for it.

Training the team to push back on clients (54:00)

Alex: OK. Tracking back to the progress. Where did we jump off?

Brigitte: OK. So I’ve slowed down. I’ve onboarded team members. I spent a lot of time on that. I actually hired somebody to help me with this training program. I spent a ton of money, stopped working with her halfway through and did my own thing.

Alex: Training in what regard? What were you training?

Brigitte: The people coming on, whether they came from PR or from podcast booking, had to learn our process, which was easy. And our systems. We had a pretty in-depth system, but I had a lot of training videos for that. What they really had to learn was: what are the hosts looking for? What makes a good pitch? What’s that magic? Some folks came in and were able to glean that and pick it up right away. Other folks needed more help.

And then I had other folks, like one guy who worked with me. I think he’d be comfortable with me using his name: Sam. We worked on this a lot. I did weekly one-to-ones with every team member, 30 minutes every week. I didn’t want to be on Zoom, so we just did it on the phone. And Sam needed help with client management, because one of my values for the company was: we’re not yes men.

One of the things I tried to teach the team was this. You need to understand that the client is an expert in their business, in the thing they’re sharing on the podcast. And we are the experts on how to do that. For example, we’d have clients come to us and say, “I heard that you need to follow up with a podcast host seven times and drive to the no.” It’s terrible advice. It’s bad advice. But it was being taught in a really prominent book-yourself-on-a-podcast course that a podcast host was giving. His thing was, drive to the no. So we’d have clients come and say, “How many times do you follow up with a host? If they say no, will you go back to them? Will you go back to them again?”

We would do two follow-ups, max, and we had a process for doing that. Things do get lost. I had a lot of hosts say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I meant to book you. Thank you so much for this.” But we’d have to educate the clients. Look, if you want to go to that podcast host yourself and ask them seven times until they say no to you, sure. But we have other clients. We can’t burn a relationship with somebody by nagging them, and never be able to book another client with them. The reason you hire us is for our relationships, and we need to take care of our relationships with these hosts. They need to know that we’re never going to spam them for anything.

So with Sam, I had to work with him on how to do that pushback with clients, because he came from an agency where it was very much “clients are always right”. A lot of the training I had to do with people was that kind of thing. What are the three or four things that are really unique to us, compared with somewhere else you might have worked, and how does that show up? I spent a lot of time helping folks learn that, so that when they were working with clients, they were extensions, not of me, but of the values I had for the company. What I wanted the company to embody.

Why one-to-ones matter (57:43)

Alex: This is an interesting one, because it’s sometimes hard to communicate what that means practically. If you say “we’re not yes men”, I can interpret that one way and you can mean it another way. How I execute it is kind of wonky. Then it comes back to your attention and you’re like, no, no, no, this is not what we’re doing. I’ve seen a lot of this, because it’s sometimes too hard to get that granular with examples of what these things are. But as you scale, those are the things that make or break you, I think, at some level.

Brigitte: And I don’t think there’s a way you can do it without one-to-ones. I did not want to do one-to-ones. I was like, we’re a small team, we don’t need it. My husband is a big fan of a podcast called Manager Tools, and he had started doing one-to-ones in his company. No one in his company does them. Before he left, he was top rated in the region for employee satisfaction. He’s working there again now, and it’s happening again. It’s unbelievable. He would push me and push me: “You need to do this. You need this.” And I’d say, “No, we don’t.” He was totally right. I hate it. I hate it.

Because the one-to-one is where you get that unfiltered moment where stuff comes up. I do the kind of one-to-one where it’s their agenda. We have 30 minutes, and you start with anything. You can talk about your trip. You can talk about a client problem. You can get on the phone and say, “I don’t want to do this today.” That almost never happens. It’s where you build trust, where they feel like they can start opening up to you about those shades-of-gray things, and you can do some more coaching on the fly. I don’t know how else you can catch that kind of stuff if you’re not in regular communication with people.

Alex: I have a hypothesis, yet to be tested. I’m working through this with a client at the moment. Their values are clear. The level of craft and care they take with certain things is evident in how they behave. But there’s a translation problem in getting that out to the team. So the hypothesis is that you get really, really granular, and it’s going to feel a bit weird to provide examples. The user manual is a pretty simple tool to do that at a high level.

I do think there’s a second level if you’re really scaling. Say you’ve got multiple people working in marketing, people in engineering, people in other things. If you’re small and founder led, and you want to be consistent and coherent on voice, then you either accept that it’s going to be different from what you want, and you eat that. Or you provide specific direction, with examples, and talk people through it. I don’t think you’re allowed to be in the middle, because you’re going to be so dissatisfied. It’s going to be, “Oh, they don’t understand what I want.” But at the same time you’re not giving them the guidance to show them what you do want. So then it’s back on you. And ultimately you’re responsible for everything anyway when you’re the founder. That’s how it goes.

Your first hires carry the culture (1:01:15)

Brigitte: This is the work I’m doing with people now. There’s a theory that one person can manage 10 to 12 direct reports, and that’s where things start breaking. I took that, and I say: for your first 10 to 12 people, you should be doing this directly with them. And what you’ll see is that through this process you get to know people.

A really strong example from my company: I had somebody working with me named Kelly. She has a PR background. I have never in my life met a person who can write an email to another human being, to a stranger, that feels so warm and genuine. The pitches she would write to people were magic in a bottle, in terms of that feeling of: you care about me, you’ve researched me. Podcasters are always saying they want that, and Kelly could just do it.

Making people feel cared for was one of our values. We wanted the podcasters to feel like we weren’t doing a spray and pray and sending the same pitch to a million people. So it’s really important to make that connection, but to do it quickly, in under 300 words. That is so hard to do. And Kelly could do it. So once she was trained up and I’d learned that, if I had somebody else who needed help, I’d say, “You know what? You need to go have a session with Kelly.” So it’s not you. You get yourself out of that bottleneck. But with those first people, you’re training them, and then you’re learning.

I had another person on my team, Val, who had managed clients before. Oh God, I think I might have cried after this call. We were on a call and she was telling me about a client who was pushing back on his program and having some issues. I said, “Oh, do you need me to get on a call with him?” Because I had always managed the issues. And she said, “No, I’ve got this.” I was like, what do you mean? She said, “We’re in communication. I’m just letting you know, so you know what’s happening, and I’ll let you know after we talk.”

Then she reported back to me. She said, “I handled it. Here’s the outcome.” It was perfect. It was better than what I would have done, because I was emotionally wrapped up in the company. So then, if somebody else came on board and was dealing with a client problem, I’d say, “Go talk to Val.” I knew she knew what to do, and I knew she did it the way I would have wanted it done.

So when you think about scaling these things, eventually it’s not you anymore. But you’ve got to impart it to your first hires. Those are the people who spread that culture of “here’s how we do things” for you. They become your ambassadors to the rest of the team as it grows.

Alex: I agree with that. I had this learning at GoDaddy, actually. There was a member of the team named Matt. He’ll laugh if and when he hears this. I’d look at him working at his computer, and he’d often be goofing off in the office. I’d say, “What are you up to, man?” And he’d be on Facebook or something. It would make my blood boil, because I was like, you’ve got to work in this way, and if you’re not grinding it out, and so on. I had all of these things in my head.

But his way of working was that he’d take a breather, chill, goof off. And then somehow, some way, he would deliver the outcome every time. I would test him on this. I’d set an even more difficult target. And I’m like, how is this guy doing it? To this day, I really don’t know how he got these things done. His work method didn’t align with how I saw the world, and it frustrated me. But he still got the results, so I couldn’t be mad about it.

That was a lesson for me, because there’s some acceptance in that. You’re not going to understand their process. It may even upset you a little when you look at it. But if they get the result, the result is satisfactory and the work is getting done, sometimes you just need to get the hell out of the way.

Deciding to close (1:05:35)

Alex: OK, we veered off training. We were talking about the training program, but I’m veering us back on, because I want to go through the rest of the story now.

Brigitte: We’re getting close to the end here, so that’s good. Where do you want me to go? From here, we were just kind of smooth sailing. And then I decided to close it.

Alex: Huh.

Brigitte: Yeah. So the thing that happened there… I’m trying to think about when this was. I think it was the next year. I’m out living my dream life, traveling around, going to national parks, hiking, and everything was sort of catching up. The fact that I hadn’t been doing the marketing meant things were starting to slow down. I feel like getting the year right is important here, because the timing matters. I think it was the summer of 2022. I just remember being in a job that I didn’t want to do.

And I remember being in the trailer with Lucas and saying, “I really think the economy is taking a turn. I think we’re entering a recession.” It was when inflation was going kind of crazy, and I was like, it just feels really bad. Things were slowing down. We were getting a lot of competition at that time, because we’d been early to market, and there was a lot of race to the bottom on pricing. So our growth was slowing down. It was still steady. It was fine. But I was like, I think we’re in for it, and I just don’t want to do it again. By “again”, I meant the COVID times. I just didn’t want to go through it.

She always hated working in PR (1:07:40)

Brigitte: And the dirty secret of all of this is that I’ve always hated working in PR. I hate it.

I partially wanted to build an agency because of how I got here. I came out of school with a creative writing degree and went straight into agency life, because I was like, this is a way I can write for a living and be creative. You know how that goes. I left and thought, I want to start a business and work with people, because even in my agency life I knew that I really liked leading other people. I think that’s really rare. When people I’ve mentored accomplish things, I feel it more deeply than the things I accomplish myself. I just love that feeling. And I like working on systems a lot. So I was like, this is what I want to do, and I’m going to do it in the PR space, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing I’m qualified to do.

So I’m sitting there thinking, the economy is going to take a turn and it’s really freaking me out. And I just don’t have enough love for the industry I’m in. I know PR takes a hit. I just didn’t want to do it.

And God, Alex, I really hate to say it, but I was right. You know this, but I don’t think a lot of people understand what happened to service businesses when interest rates went up and companies had no access to capital. We have been in a recession in the service market, brutally, for three years now. People are struggling. I’ve always had a good eye for economics and the market. I just saw it and was like, I can’t do it. I just can’t.

Shutting down with the team in the loop (1:09:48)

Brigitte: I went into mourning. I stopped taking on new clients. I quietly shut down the company. I actually wrote a whole blog post, I don’t know if you found it, about how I managed this with the team. From that moment to when we finally shut down was more than six months. It was a lot of communicating with the team about what was going on. It was a whole thing.

We had shut down and people didn’t even know we were shut down. That was the next year, actually, the next summer from when I started thinking about this. No one knew. It was crazy. I finally announced it. And that’s actually when I sold the company. It had been shut down for about six months, I think, when I started getting into those conversations. I just took a break.

Alex: Huh. Were you still servicing clients? What does “shut down” mean?

Brigitte: I had a couple of contracts, and I had somebody on the team finish them out. So I had a couple of people subcontract. We came to a revenue share agreement, and the clients knew what was happening. Because we did have these year-long contracts.

When this first happened, I wasn’t positive I wanted to shut down. But I was feeling like a recession is coming, and we’ve got to figure something out. So I started working with the team in that time. I said, “You guys, I really think the economy is going to take a hit. Here’s what that means for our industry. We need to come up with a lower-priced product. We need something that isn’t such a big commitment if we want to weather this.”

So the team worked with me to come up with a project scope. It took the first six weeks of our process, when we onboarded clients and delivered a package to them. Clients loved that part. They’d say, “You’re giving me language for things I never had. I feel so seen in my business. I never knew how to put my story together before working with you.” People loved it.

What we did was almost a VIP day format, but a little more extended. They’d do the onboarding. We’d deliver the plan and a pitch list. Then they’d get Voxer support from a team member, but they would go out and implement it themselves. It was a lower-priced product, wildly successful and super profitable. A team member developed it with me, and she trained the team. So by the time I finally made the decision, we were already shifting to a lot more of these smaller projects.

So I was letting the team know what to expect. I was giving them updates: here’s what’s happening, we’re getting fewer inquiries for our main 12-month project, but the smaller one is going really well. I was calling it the Podcast something Intensive. The intensives were going really well.

I was trying to work out, how do you be transparent with people that there could be a change? I had an amazing team, Alex. Oh my God, they were amazing. I wanted to be transparent enough that they could make their own choices about whether to stay or leave. One person left, and she heads up development for the Nature Conservancy’s South American operations. So she moved on to an amazing job. But most folks decided to stay with me.

I finally told them, a month beforehand, that we were going to shut down completely and not take new projects. And I made commitments to all of them: whatever you want, I’m going to help you figure it out. If it’s a new job. If you want to keep doing this. One of my guys ended up servicing a few clients who were contracted with us for quite some time, actually. He was working with them, and I was mentoring him a little bit, while he started up his own agency with his girlfriend, who’s now his wife. They’re doing great. They’re traveling the world and running their own agency. And a couple of people made career changes.

It’s so sad. It hurts to think about it.

Alex: Well, thank you for sharing. There’s a lot of heart and soul that goes into this, and those are not easy decisions to make. So I appreciate you giving me some insight into it.

Brigitte: But you should be yelling at me, because I should have sold at our peak and not…

Alex: If there’s anything I’ve learned from the last five years or so, it’s that it’s never as linear as you want it to be. It is never as linear as you want it to be. And what is true for you is going to look so different from someone else’s pathway. There’s an ideal outcome that you think you should get to some way. But often it’s never that linear, packaged up and organized. It just doesn’t work out like that sometimes.

So again, I commend you for looking after your team, having their best interests at heart and communicating clearly. There are so many stories, especially from high-profile startups. They raise a bunch of money. They just shut down. They don’t care. They torpedo their network. They torpedo their employees. They walk away and say, “Ah, it’s just business.” That’s the norm. That’s a lot more common than the way you approached it.

Brigitte: Yeah. There’s a saying that as a founder you have more risk than your team. I don’t understand that. First of all, I have an LLC. If the business goes bankrupt, I’m not going bankrupt. And I know what the forecasts are for the business. I don’t understand that mentality at all. You’re protected through your business structure. It’s not true, because you have more insight into what’s coming.

That whole time, when I think about integrity, it was that I didn’t want to panic people, and I didn’t have all the answers. Figuring out how to navigate that was so hard. But I’m glad. I’m still in contact with them. We’re on WhatsApp. In fact, I referred one of them to another job this morning. We’re all friends on Instagram with our life posts. And it’s good.

The day she wished Airtable were her job (1:16:35)

Brigitte: Also, through this process, the reason I was finally able to make the decision, and why I feel good about it, is one day when we were still in the trailer. Since then, my husband and I have bought a house. We’ve settled down in Sacramento. He’s gone back to his bank job. They welcomed him back after, I guess for him it was five years. And he loves it. He’s doing great. It was super good for him.

But we were in our trailer, and I was working on one of our systems. I was doing an automation in Airtable. They had just rolled out these interfaces. I was spending all this time on it, way too much time. And I thought to myself, I just wish this were my job. And then I was like, wait a minute.

I came to realize that in building this company in this way, I had developed skill sets that I didn’t have before. I was building an agency around PR because I knew how to do it. I was good at it. And I started having this thought: what if I took all of this energy and built something that I like doing? What would that be like?

Alex: I love that. What an insight, hey? I chuckled when you said you hate PR, because I hated WordPress. WordPress is the worst. It hasn’t got any better in 10 years. It sucks to use. It’s so frustrating. But there’s a decision you make internally, where you’re like, it sucks, but there’s an end point I’m getting to. What do they say? The juice is worth the squeeze, or it’s a means to an end, or whatever throwaway thing you want to say about it. Which is fine, unless you’re in it and you’re like, I don’t like this at all. This stresses me out. I don’t love it. So I can relate. I’m with you.

Selling a company that was already shut down (1:18:45)

Alex: So Airtable automation leads you to what? Where do you end up after that? Actually, hang on. You sold. We kind of buried the lede on this one, which you can’t do when I’m talking to someone who’s ex-PR.

Brigitte: We are now ex-PR, by the way.

Alex: The sale. Take me through the sale, and then let’s talk about what you’re doing now. As much detail as you’re comfortable sharing.

Brigitte: I was working with a business coach at the time. I’d met her at a conference, and she wanted to coach me on marketing the business. I said, “You don’t understand. I want to exit this business. I need to figure out what’s next for me. I’m hiring you to coach me on figuring out what I’m going to do next.” Oh God, so many conversations. She really wanted me to keep working on my business.

Then we start working through the exit. I’ve actually never told this part of the story. Through her coaching, she’s working with someone else who runs a company in a related industry and is looking to do some acquisitions. And she says, “She actually might be interested in buying yours.” I had turnkey systems. Over the years we had built this database. We had logged every single client that we pitched, to every single podcast. We had this huge database and relationships, and somebody could just pick up the system and use it. My coach said, “That might have value to her for what she’s doing. I’ll connect you.”

We got pretty far in those talks. We’d actually come to a verbal agreement. Then she had some life things happen, and she reached out to me and said, “This just isn’t the time. I’m really sorry.”

And I’m like, huh. Somebody wants to pay me money for this thing that isn’t happening anymore. I started toying with it. I could try to sell the agency: all the systems, the name, the brand, everything, and our data. Or I could do a licensing of the database and everything. And I really quickly thought, I don’t want to do licensing, because then I’m still in the same place. I just didn’t want to do it. I don’t want to stay in this industry. I want to do something else. This is just delaying the inevitable. It might have a bigger payout, except I don’t want to do it, so it won’t.

Six meetings and three offers from a LinkedIn post (1:21:20)

Brigitte: So I was like, let me put it out there and see if anybody else is interested. Was this a LinkedIn post or something? Yes. I made a LinkedIn post saying I was looking at offers for the business, and I put it out to my email list. And I had some people reach out.

I should have added this up. I ended up having, I think, six meetings. And three real offers in total. I thought it was four, but right now I can only think of three. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked.

I had my line in the sand. The company was shut down, but I knew I wanted some cash up front. There were some people who wanted to do a profit share kind of payout over a series of years as the deal, with no cash. And I was like, absolutely not.

Alex: We call those shenanigans in deal land. “I’ll give you a great payment, but it’s going to be over 36 installments, starting on the leap year, every blue moon.” And you’re like, oh yeah, no.

Brigitte: It was interesting. One of the people who reached out to me was a competitor. Oh yeah, that’s the sixth. I just thought of a sixth person. A couple of competitors. One person we got really far with was a former client, which was really interesting. She was doing a bunch of agency acquisitions. That was a hard one to walk away from, but I just didn’t like the terms of the deal. Oh God, she’s a really smart woman.

In the end it came through my LinkedIn post. It was somebody in my network. He had been considering, do I do an acquisition, or do I do white labeling with another company? He preferred the acquisition. He knew my company and our reputation already, but I had never met him before. We ended up having a bunch of talks, everything worked out and the acquisition went through.

Alex: I’m just thinking of a headline: how to sell your business on LinkedIn with a post. You could sell a course on that, for sure. OK, exited. And that was a handover of systems, processes, data, all that back-end stuff?

Brigitte: Yeah. It was a handover of the client list, the email list (we both have access to the email list), all the data and all the systems. I actually have a license to use some of the administrative systems. So if I’m helping other people with hiring, I can reference the hiring documents I put together, which is really cool. And a little bit of strategic advising up front.

Not overlearning a lesson (1:24:50)

Alex: With everything you’ve shared, because of the non-linearity of it, you’ve had ups and downs. But all the way along there are things you’re taking away from it, and to me that’s really enthralling stuff. I’m learning a lot.

Brigitte: Thank you. I’m glad. I feel like I’ve been blathering on a bit, but I can’t help it. I’m really analytical about things. And sometimes I have to not overlearn a lesson. I had something with a team member when she left, and it went really badly. I was working with somebody at the time, kind of a business therapist. And the message was, you don’t need to take away too much from every experience. Sometimes it can be to your own detriment to always want to learn from things. You learn the wrong thing, or too much, because you’re looking for that lesson. I find that really hard. I don’t know if you do.

Alex: It’s a trait. It’s ownership, right? Some folks will be like, something went wrong, I don’t really want to look at my role in that, and I just hope it doesn’t happen again. And then there’s the other side. There’s a lot of pendulum stuff here.

Brigitte: I’m very much on the other extreme.

Alex: I can relate. I’ve done the same thing over and over again. I’m responsible for all of it. It’s all my fault. I should have seen it. I should have known better. I should have done better. I’m never going to make that same mistake again. Now I’m going to go and flagellate myself, because I was the worst and I should have known better. And that’s also not constructive. It’s somewhere in the middle.

The Ops Whisperer (1:26:45)

Alex: All right. What are you doing today? The Ops Whisperer. Great name. Love it. Talk to me more about it.

Brigitte: I’m still very much in the early stages of putting this next iteration together. I’m trying to pull together the things I had to learn in running this company about how you work yourself out of the day to day.

One thing we didn’t talk about: my husband and I always argue about how much I work. He would say I work all the time. I would say I work 20 hours a week. When you’re a business owner, you’re thinking about your business 24 hours a day, right? But that doesn’t mean I’m working when I’m on a hike in the middle of the day.

Alex: With a notepad. “Just one minute, one minute.”

Brigitte: Oh my God. Yeah. So we have a difference of opinion about how many hours I worked. But I truly was able to run an agency built on the methodology I developed, and live this off-grid life. And it was amazing.

I’ve really come to realize something about the advice out there for people at this stage. You’re building a business around something you have developed, that you’re doing a little differently than other people. You’re small. You’re not funded with seed money. You’re bootstrapping. A lot of the systems out there don’t work for that. Traction, EOS, the Lean Startup. They’re just not quite right.

So right now I’m working mostly with agency owners, or people in services, on that thing we were talking about earlier. How do you get all of those intangible things out of your head and imprint them on your team, so they can run the company for you?

I’m really big into systems and automations. But I think systems and automations exist to enable the people to do the best work, not the other way around. So how do you create systems that make it easier for people to do the work they need to do, and that incentivize them in the right ways? How do you form relationships so that you’re not being surprised with problems all the time?

All of this stuff. Because one of the really hard things for me was, how do I do that? I would Google, “What am I even supposed to be doing in a staff meeting?” I could not figure out what the function of a staff meeting was supposed to be in my company. I would read so many books. And I’m like, no one will tell me. I don’t understand.

Alex: Fair, fair.

Brigitte: So that’s what The Ops Whisperer is all about. It’s helping people at that stage where the business is growing. I’m not your girl to come and help write a marketing page or design all that. But the business is growing, and you need the team to step up for you in a bigger way than they are now.

Starting again, and accountability (1:30:05)

Alex: So how do you get clients for that? Is this still through your network, folks who know you and referrals? Or are you out there writing blog posts about concepts you already understand, and boring yourself to sleep?

Brigitte: I’ve gotten my first few clients through the old way, definitely: emailing people. “Do you know anybody looking for work like this?” Tried and true.

I’m also enrolled in a marketing program with somebody. She does Facebook. I’ve known her for a really long time. I actually have a client who’s done her year-long marketing mastermind. They will review 100% of the copy and the things you put together, and help you figure out which offers are going to work. That’s really important to me. I want to have something where I can turn on lead gen that isn’t always networking. So that’s something I’m trying to build from the very beginning this time.

Alex: That’s a lesson. I also have to commend you. Throughout this conversation I think I’ve heard three or four different people or programs that you’ve leaned on. You identify something you need help with and you don’t stall. You find someone you trust, or you go to a program, and you say, I can improve on that. That in itself is a bit of a skill: having a good awareness of where you might need some help. And it’s often very hard to ask for help, because it’s kind of like, oh, I should know better.

Brigitte: Alex, starting again once you’ve done it is so much harder.

Alex: Yep.

Brigitte: When I was 29, when I left my first job and went out on my own, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I did one thing at a time and built it over many years. Lucas would always say to me, “You’ve learned so much.” And I would downplay it. I’d be like, what do you even mean? Now I’m kind of seeing it, because you know what’s ahead of you, and it’s kind of exhausting.

That’s actually why I’m doing this program. I need the accountability. Left to my own devices, I will just faff around, reading books and playing Civilization all day.

Alex: This is what we were talking about before: that threshold between knowing how to do something and having some commitment to get it done. Sometimes the investment is time or money. When it’s both, it becomes real. It’s like, I have to see this through. If I don’t have something at risk or at stake, I know myself well enough to know that I’ll play Civilization, or do whatever I need to do.

Brigitte: Yeah. But if somebody I like tells me to do something, I will so deeply fear disappointing them that I’ve got to show up.

Alex: Fascinating. The accountability part is huge. That’s massive.

Brigitte: Alex, if I had not done my homework and had showed up to those calls with you without being a teacher’s pet doing the work, that would have crushed my image of myself. I can’t have that.

Alex: So again, polarity. I would have clients who would do nothing. We’d get on the call and it would be, “I’m still where I was last week.” I’m like, cool, what action did you take? “Well…” Those were the people where I’d say, OK, we have to press pause on having calls. Ultimately, the way I can help you is if you want to take action. If you choose not to take action, that’s not something I can do for you. It’s always a bit of a weird zone, and it takes a couple of weeks to get there.

The people who actually did the homework, did the review and did what they needed to do got the most value out of it for themselves. And it makes me really excited to work with them. I’m like, yes, I’m going to be hyped, we’re going to have fun and we’re going to go through a lot of content. It’s going to be really good. So yeah. Teacher’s pet, top of the class. Awesome. Unreal.

Where to find Brigitte (1:34:40)

Alex: OK. If people want to find out more about you and what you’re doing, where would they find you? Maybe no longer on X or Twitter, more LinkedIn?

Brigitte: I have a site I built called theopswhisperer.com. That has a link to the Substack, where I have an email list. On Substack I’m posting a mix of these longer-form essays, and I’m excavating some of the lessons I’ve learned, like we’re doing here. And I’m Brigitte Lyons on LinkedIn. I do post there sometimes. My Instagram is really just hiking content and home renovation content. I’m terrible. I don’t really use social media.

So the website, and through it the Substack, is probably the best place to chat with me. And if people want to talk to me, there’s always an opportunity to book a call. I’d love to do that. I’m stable now, and one of my things is that I’m open to having calls. So that’s a change in my thinking. It’s different.

Alex: Ah, OK. I’m going to see who I can send your way to have a call. Because if you’re available for a call, that could be a limited-time-only thing. So get in there.

Brigitte: My mood might change in six months.