Dustin Riechmann | How To Build Solid Relationships Through Podcasts

Dustin Riechmann | How To Build Solid Relationships Through Podcasts

by | Podcast

Dustin Riechmann is a serial entrepreneur, coach, and digital marketing expert. He specializes in coaching mission-driven solopreneurs to add six figures to their bottom line by telling the right stories on the right podcasts. Dustin is also a Partner at FireCreek Snacks, a fast-growing, better-for-you snack company with over $1M in annual sales, and the Founder of Engaged Marriage, which provides practical tips, tools, and training to help married couples pursue their dream marriage. 

In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran is joined by Dustin Riechmann, a serial entrepreneur, coach, and digital marketing expert, to talk about building solid relationships through podcasts. They also discuss Dustin’s entrepreneurial journey, his five-step framework for appearing on podcasts, and how to get ROI and earn profits through a podcast.

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Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

  • [01:48] What inspired Dustin Riechmann to start Engaged Marriage? 
  • [04:35] How Dustin grew his business through collaborations
  • [07:59] Dustin’s experience running a side business while working full-time
  • [13:30] The business lessons Dustin learned from attending trade shows and appearing on podcasts
  • [22:32] How Dustin started coaching entrepreneurs
  • [28:05] How to build solid business relationships through podcasts
  • [35:48] Strategies for getting ROI and profits with a podcast
  • [46:06] The peers Dustin acknowledges for their support

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Sponsor: Rise25

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution. 

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?

When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy

We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars,  YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk,  and many more.  

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win? 

Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.

Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

Chad Franzen 0:02

Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now, let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran 0:19

Hey everyone, John Corcoran here, I am the host of this show. My guest today is Dustin Riechmann. We’re gonna get into his background, his story, we’ve got some parallels between us and kind of how we got into the business that we do. Now both of us have a little entrepreneurial career, serial entrepreneur sort of thing done a number of different businesses. So we’re gonna get into that. But first, of course, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, our company, where we help b2b business owners get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. And you can learn all about what we do by going to rise25.com. And we’ve got all kinds of education and training there. 

Dustin, it’s a pleasure to have you here today. So Dustin Riechmann. He is a serial entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He specializes in helping mission-driven solopreneurs add six figures to their bottom line by telling the right stories on the right podcast. So he’s helping people with both the messaging and also getting on to podcasts, which of course, we’re in the podcast base, a million podcasts plays for about 13 years now. And I love it. I have so many great friendships, I’m gonna get relationships, so many great client engagements and referral partners. For us. It’s come through podcasting. So I love connecting with other people who are in this small segment of the universe. But Dustin, you also have had a couple of other companies, FireCreek Snacks is one of them. Engaged Marriage was another one. Simple Success Coaching is your current business. But let’s start with a gauge marriage. So you and I both around 2009. I was working for a law firm at the time, and we were both a bit captivated with what was happening in the blogging and podcasting world. And you were a follower of Dan Miller. So for those who don’t know who Dan Miller is, I was really an admirer of him because he was kind of a trailblazer in this space. But who’s Dan Miller and how did you get into following his work?

Dustin Riechmann 2:16

Yeah, well, thanks, John. So awesome to be here. I know we’re gonna have a lot of fun, kind of going back and recapping some of this journey and why it’s relevant to what we’re doing today. But yeah, so Dan Miller is New York Times best-selling author, he runs a company called 48 Days. And circa 2009, I was pretty burned out, I was a traffic engineer. So my background is a professional engineering. And I’d taken a vacation from that was with my wife in Cancun laying on the beach. For some reason, I had a book called No More Mondays, and it was one of the Dan’s books that kind of said that you shouldn’t have to dread Mondays, right? And, and you can kind of coexist your day job with like a creative passion. And my wife and I, at that point for several years, had been involved in marriage ministry. So I kind of had this passion project, but it was taking place in like dark church basements. And as you said, everyone was talking about blogging, and there’s like, make money online. And all this stuff was coming up. And I thought, I wonder if I could take what we’re doing there and bring it online. So I decided to do that while I was sipping a drink on the beaches in Cancun, and came home. I’m sure Google or Yahoo would have probably at that time, had a create a website, and I made my own WordPress site and engagedmarriage.com and just started writing three days a week. Yeah, and it took off pretty quickly. Actually, I still have close friends today that I met through that. It was my first. It was like the first example for me of the power of collaboration and marketing partnerships. And we can talk about a few of those. So I’m involved by Pat Flynn, and Dan and some some other people that people now admire. But you know, I’ve kind of reached out to them before anyone else knew them back in the day.

John Corcoran 3:49

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what year Pat started his podcast, maybe 2008. Something like this. Yeah. Probably around then. Before that, of course, yeah. Smart Passive Income was a blog primarily. And I was Yeah, I was reading his stuff for sure. Early on, and kind of following his journey and all that kind of stuff. Income

Dustin Riechmann 4:10

reports. Yeah. Well, of course, he was an architect turned entrepreneur. And I was an engineer. And I was like, the fact that maybe I can do it. So

John Corcoran 4:17

Boyer right. So all of us kind of came from a professional background, and we’re leveraging the power of the internet in order to have a bigger impact. You know, for me, it was like, I want to have a bigger impact. Maybe write a book. I didn’t know exactly what it was. But I knew that there was this tool through the internet, blogging, podcasting, that was going to be helpful in that journey. You mentioned collaboration, so what sorts of collaborations did you discover?

Dustin Riechmann 4:41

Yeah, one of the big ones I did you know, back then everyone was doing ebooks, and that was like the new way to make money. But I wasn’t trying to make money. I was trying to meet people network, grow my following. And in hindsight, like that’s how I’ve done my whole life, and that’s all my other businesses have grown to but at the time, I was like, Okay, how about I come up with and I Different ebook. And then I asked these other influencers in the marriage space or just people that are married and would be willing to contribute. And I made so I made an ebook called love every day. And it was free. But the idea was everyone would contribute a short story, a short lesson from their own relationship about how to love every day and be good to your spouse. And so I reached out to Pat and he contributed, I reached out to Dan Miller, and he contributed a guy named Tony DiLorenzo, who now has the number one marriage podcast on iTunes with his wife. And he and I are like really good friends, we traveled together and go to conferences together. But that was our first interaction was me reaching out. And if he wasn’t, he was a an OG in the podcasting space. They think their podcast started in about 2007 or eight as well. Yeah, just people like that. And and people that were more marriage specific that have since faded away. But it was great, because we came together, I didn’t have to create all the content, I just had to collaborate. But then I got relationships built with these guys. We all used it as needed as like a lead magnet to grow our email list. It was just, it was a really, really good experience. And I think it gave me a really nice initial taste for this idea of partnerships, not like trying to always be competitive with everyone, but see where we can help each other out. And that’s what that’s the theme that’s taking me to the stars at this point. So yeah,

John Corcoran 6:17

so you need to and I remember interviewing others and hearing about other people doing even teleseminars early on, where they would kind of build their audience, their community on a particular topic, whether it’s business or marriage, or whatever. And then they would collaborate with one another. And then I would do a teleseminar for your community, and you would do a teleseminar for my community. And that by virtue of doing that, I’d be introducing my community to you and you’d be interesting your community to me, and we would all grow. And then for me, around 2014 2015 is when I discovered that with webinars, and it was kind of, you know, heyday, I think of webinars, and I loved it, because it was it was something I could do from anywhere from my office. And it was it was a win win all around.

Dustin Riechmann 7:09

We love that. That’s so funny, because I did the webinars for Engaged Marriage. And also Tony, who I just mentioned, he and I ended up creating another business together and around that timeframe called Fit marriage. And it was like fitness for couples because he’s a big fitness guy. And we did like a video summit with all the top fitness people and talked about, like how that relates to marriages and relationships and like that whole topic. And so then I also grew quite a network in the fitness industry. And actually, there’s a guy named Scott Colby, who I got to know way back then. And like a month ago, we were on spring break in Tennessee. And he now does like guided hikes. So I actually his contact my family on a guided hike, because we stayed in contact since like the mid 20 via 2015. Because of the other business that grew out of that first ebook collaboration. So these dots are starting to connect even more for me now as you’re speaking.

John Corcoran 7:58

It’s funny how they keep on going, at what point did you stop with the engineering? And I’m wondering about this. Did you ever have like family members are like, What are you doing with the job with engineering? You’ve got this great stable thing. are you pursuing this blog thing? I’m sure you

Dustin Riechmann 8:14

experienced that. Yeah. And it went on for a long time because I held on to it for too long. So I started gauge marriage in 2009, I started getting very heavy into digital marketing in about 2014 started taking off time from work, to go to conferences to learn digital marketing, I went down to Austin, to digital marketer with traffic and conversion, those sort of things. So those things are always starting to become in conflict. But I didn’t actually leave full time engineering until the end of 2017. So I did this for eight years where they kind of coexisted. And I was growing one growing the side hustles while still doing the full time engineering, but yeah, I wrote a book we’re doing speaking on marriage. Then I got into digital marketing, which just kind of led to me doing marketing consulting, like my dentist hired me and my sister in law’s restaurant like his people I talked to about it. I was doing building websites, running Facebook ads, I was doing it all while I still had a full time engineering management job. And so finally, in 2017, there’s a lot of that, like, the chatter was less about, like, why would you give up engineering and is more like, is your head’s gonna explode because you work 100 hours a week and like I have three kids and a wife, I really love it. I wasn’t I wasn’t very present. So finally, mid 20 The Breakpoint of all that was like summer 2017, I had this like epiphany moment that I’ve been holding on to engineering out of fear and that it wasn’t a permanent decision. Like if I left engineering, I could actually come back if I didn’t have actually messed up entrepreneurship and I held on I missed that for a very long time. So we set a game plan for six months out so the at the end of 2017. I had like benchmarks like if I hit this with these with the consulting, then I can leave the engineering and that’s what I did. So I was finally free of that. And so now I’ve been full time I guess, you know, over five years or so.

John Corcoran 9:57

Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s a It’s hard to make that decision is so hard in my experience. You know, it was gradual over time, and I was doing less and less legal work and doing more and more non legal work as I was building my podcast, the blog, business Smart Business Revolution. And eventually I got to the point where it was just like, Okay, I’m making enough from this new thing that I can stop doing the legal work. But it also goes backwards. Sometimes I don’t know, if you had this experience, but sometimes, then, you know, I had to ramp Go back, go back and do more legal work, because the new business that I was really focused on was dried up or went through ups and downs, that sort of thing, which that that’s a challenge, too.

Dustin Riechmann 10:45

Yeah, that’s very much my experience. So my wife was a stay at home mom for eight years, including through this whole transition. So I was not only the only breadwinner, and only insurance, and so it was a pretty loaded decision. And that’s why I put so much pressure on it. See, actually, what ended up happening was I said, let me build up this war chest for six months, like, I’m gonna work even harder, but only for six months. And then we’re gonna make this decision. So I told the engineering company, basically January 1, am, I’m going to put in my two weeks notice, I can stay longer if you need me to help, like find a replacement. And I end up working, they pay me very well, for very part time work for I think, like at least the first quarter of 27, or 2018. So it actually ended up being a super easy thing. Like they gave me this great off ramp, we left on extremely good terms. And I didn’t really need to, but I had I needed to like go tap the well and get some more engineering work. I had that option, which I did not expect. I thought they would be like, just get out of here, you know, cuz I couldn’t do the gradual thing I was I had started this division within the company and I had like, 22 employees. And it was kind of like, yeah, there’s no like, gradual, I had to just out or I’m in because there was no, or at least I didn’t think there was it turned out that that actually would have been an option. But I just didn’t know to ask.

John Corcoran 11:55

Yeah. So what what happened with so you still have Engaged Marriage? But you’ve started these other projects on the side? Did you? Did you put it in a place where you felt like you could dabble in these other projects? Did you lose interest in it after having done it for a long time, which I know that’s happened with me, you know, by why these other projects?

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