Jeremy Weisz 6:06
So how did she rope you into doing that? What were you actually doing?
John Corcoran 6:10
She just gave me an audio file of her, you know, doing an interview, and I would listen to it, and then turn it into an article and made it into an article. And then that was time. Yeah, go ahead. I mean, to me, it didn’t seem that hard. But I’m naturally a writer, you know, for her. It was, it was a struggle, she didn’t want to do it. And that’s why she is Robin.
Jeremy Weisz 6:31
Nice. And so you got this idea from her? Um, and then at what point did you actually start implementing that?
John Corcoran 6:42
Well, the Yeah, I mean, so the funny thing was, I didn’t, it took a while because I, I’d seen this idea. And I guess you could say I did use the idea in written form. So, after that, I always enjoyed writing articles for my own blog or for other websites. So I write articles, and I would interview people, and I would incorporate them into the article. But then at some point, I realized, and I’d written, you know, for Forbes and Business Insider, an entrepreneur and all these different esteemed publications. But if you look back at the course of the year, you’ve maybe written a half dozen articles that doesn’t take you a ton of time, a lot of work. Yeah, you built relationships with six people, eight people, nothing that’s gonna really move the needle. And, you know, eventually it came to the realization that a much better way to do that to maximize the number of relationships you’re building, is to do a podcast, but I didn’t start doing a podcast until around 2010. And I didn’t even call it that at that time. So the story behind that is, I had a good client, it came to me for a tiny legal matter. He hired me to write a lease on a spare bedroom in his house for $500. These days, you would just put it up on Airbnb. So you wouldn’t even do this anymore, right? But he hired me for that. But I researched him. And I was like, wow, this is a really interesting guy. He’d started a number of companies, serial entrepreneurs lived in Europe, all around the globe, started companies that really became public and became household names. And so I said, kind of on a whim, I said, Can I have like 20 minutes, your time, I’d love to just interview you over the phone, I’ll record it, and I’m going to publish it to the internet. That’s all I said. I didn’t even know how to do that at the time. But I figured, well, I’ll figure out how to do it. And wish I did later. But after the conversation was over, he was like, Hey, that was a lot of fun. You know, could you help me with some other legal matters? I’ve got a couple other things that I need done, could you lose this thing? And this other thing and this other thing? And I was like, sure that sounds great. I’d love to know. And afterwards, I was like, well, I really like that. That was pretty cool. Maybe I’ll do it again. And again. And so I started interviewing others while I was practicing law. And I started interviewing other attorneys that I knew that I was friends with and started interviewing senior attorneys in the local community who were in mystically, my competitors, but many years advanced to me. And what I found is that then they would start referring business my way that was too small for them, but it was plenty big for me, is substantial for me. And then I started branching out and started interviewing. You know, founders of different companies, like three twins ice cream, which unfortunately, recently went under. I interviewed the local baseball, semi pro baseball team, founder just because I was interested and started a new semi pro baseball team. I had a conversation with the founder of lagunitas over the phone to interview him, who’s the kind of a quirky guy who never ended up interviewing him. But you know, I just kind of more and more interesting people started coming along and started connecting with people.
Jeremy Weisz 9:37
You know, what’s interesting, John, is because we’ll talk to people and they go, Well, you know, I’m kind of a, I mean, everyone’s different. But some businesses, you know, this is gonna work in my local area. You know, I’m a lawyer, I only serve the San Francisco area or Detroit area or Chicago area, you know, does this actually does it even make sense to do it and kind of He says like, well, you can get to know, like a lot of people in your vicinity, in my opinion, it actually puts it on hyperdrive. Right, you just talked about. Okay, so you know, the owner of the semi pro team, you know, the owner of the local ice cream place that everyone goes to, you know, you know?
John Corcoran 10:17
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he gives you license to reach out to them, it gives you an excuse. Whereas, like, if you’re just a regular service provider, you know, and you reach out to someone like that, it’s just, you know, depending on what you do, it’s probably going to be perceived as, Oh, this person is just trying to sell to me, you know, if you just, you can’t just reach out to the local, the owner of the local baseball team and say, Hey, do you 15 minutes, I’d love to like pick your brain just like talk to you about what it was like starting baseball ends and be like, No, I’m busy and lots of stuff going on. But when you make that shift, and when it’s for the purpose of promoting them, and and a lot of people struggle with that idea that, if you’re just starting out, you’re starting a podcast that it actually is delivering value to that person, it’s giving them additional exposure, because they think like, Oh, I don’t have an audience, or I don’t have a lot of downloads yet, or something like that, it doesn’t matter, it’s still you are taking time out of your day, in order to help promote that person and that there are other ways beyond downloads, you can share it, of course, you can, you can tell your, you know, friends, all your friends and neighbors, you can share it on your social channels, there’s other ways you can get additional exposure for them.
Jeremy Weisz 11:25
That’s a good point. You know, we talked about that. I don’t have an audience, what do I do? What do I do? I’m reaching out to people and, you know, it’s like, what do you do? How do you provide value? I know we, you know, I’ve posted a link, let’s say on social media, LinkedIn, and I just thought about who would be good to watch this specifically. And I remember it was someone who did LinkedIn ads. And all I did was tag one person in the comment, and I’m like, Hey, I know you do run LinkedIn ads, you should probably watch this. And they connected, right. And so people need clients. So you don’t need to have an audience of 1000 people, 10,000 people, a million people, you just have to think about who would be valuable? Who would that interview be valuable for? And, you know, I joke around and you say this, you just need your phone, right? I mean, you literally need your phone, and you have people in your phone, everyone has connections, if you look on Facebook, or LinkedIn, your close connections and, and in your just to text people and say this would be valuable for you to listen to.
John Corcoran 12:36
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it’s a different world that we live in these days, you know, there are these great social channels like LinkedIn that so many professionals are active on. And that people gather in and it’s a way, you know, it’s an easier way to introduce people used to a simple world, like you’re in a physical room, you’re next to people who don’t know each other, you introduce them to one another. But that’s not the world we live in now, especially these days. And so you have to adapt to the times you have to adapt to the mediums that are available to you now, which can actually put those things on hyperdrive, because you can, you can actually make a lot more introductions that way. And it’s great when people share content, and then it leads to an introduction, whether it’s for you or someone else, or whatever. Yeah, I know, Jeremy, we’re going to talk also about your first time, but you know, maybe what we do is we save that for another episode. And we talk more, so it’s all about you.
Jeremy Weisz 13:33
I mean, I love that you brought up the no audience thing, because that comes up a lot. And I think that we all have a lot more value to give than we give ourselves credit for sometimes.
John Corcoran 13:46
Absolutely. No, I think so. I think people, you know, I was talking with a client yesterday, who helps do PR for lawyers and law firms. And, you know, she talks to these, you know, really seasoned, experienced, law firm partners who’ve been practicing law for 2025 years, and what’s the first thing out of their mouth? What do I talk about? What are the ideas? Do I have anything that’s interesting for people that they’re going to want to know about? I think we all kind of minimize that, especially if we’ve been doing it for a while. And it’s our area of expertise. You know, and if you can do it very easily, can minimize it. You think, yeah. You know, and so you think that people, other people would not be interested in hearing about it from you? And that’s absolutely not true. You know,
Jeremy Weisz 14:39
what else? So the early days, you know, you learned a valuable lesson at that point, and then you actually utilized it in your legal practice. And I think that’s also another important point, because, you know, most people think about how to get downloads and subscribers and you actually had a business Notice that it, you know, resulted in making sense for.
John Corcoran 15:05
Yeah. And so that’s the other point is that, you know, I had a business that at the time was practicing law. And, you know, I didn’t worry about doing this new technology, this new medium that would somehow minimize me or people who think less of me, or I would be embarrassed by it or anything like that. All I really, you know, what I realized is that it’s just having conversation with someone, you know, it is also an excuse, to talk to hire to get introductions to higher and higher caliber people, which then materialize in form of referrals and other other client work as well. Because the other thing people don’t realize is that it’s the principle of reciprocity, you’re delivering value to people, and then they want to repay the favor when you do that,
Jeremy Weisz 15:52
You know, on the introductions front, I love when my friends have a podcast, because it is much easier for me, you and I, we tend to make probably 30 introductions every day between the two of us. And it makes it very easy for me to refer and recommend someone to them without trying to qualify them, because I know it’s gonna provide value for both parties. And then they can, you know, talk and decide if it’s something that makes sense to do together, you know, in the future.
John Corcoran 16:24
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So I think we’re, we’re running a little short on time. But, you know, I thought, uh, two other stories, which we can tell next time we do an episode like this. So you’ll have to check that out when we do that. But I also want to tell the story about I was about four or five years into doing the podcast, and I realized at the end of one year, calendar year, it’s December, you’re reflecting back looking at the year, and I intended to have a weekly podcast, and I realized I only published seven episodes, and you and I just become business partners. And so I made a critical decision at that time that I had to change things. And that actually really influences the way that we’ve organized our business today. So I want to talk about that next time. And then the other thing I want to talk about is that, you know, you and I for six or seven, eight years, whatever, we’d been telling everyone we knew they should start a podcast, they should start a podcast, even if no one’s listening to it, it will bring such tremendous value to your life, that it will be a great use of of your time if you do it, right. But we found that that wasn’t enough. When we told people that everyone said great, okay, that’s great. And then no one did it. No one would start a podcast and they gave every excuse under the book. And so we made a decision in our business, that we were tired of hearing those excuses. And we make it so easy for people that they had no excuses that they would have to do it. And that really was a turning point for us in our business and in helping so many others to get started doing a podcast by making it easy and, and allowing them to focus on the highest and best use of their time. So I’d like to talk about Those stories next time as well. So, Dr. Weisz, I’ll turn it back to you. So where should everyone go if they want to learn more about us and the work that we do?
Jeremy Weisz 18:10
Um, you could hear us bantering on rise25.com, there’s a video and John decided to include in all the outtakes in that particular video, so check it out. rise25.com, if you have questions, you can email us on the contact form.
John Corcoran 18:28
That’s great. All right. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.
Outro 18:31
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.