What I love most about this conversation around hiring a podcast manager is that it’s going to help you build out the questions you’re going to ask me when we sit down because these three pieces are not just what you need to be considering going into it but whoever you work with should be able to answer these same questions.
If as we move through today’s conversation, you hear me mention something and you’re like, “Yes, I want to know more about that,” make sure you check out What Working With Uncommonly More Looks Like. That actually walks you through exactly what working with our team looks like, so you can get an understanding of if that feels good for you, if that sounds like what you are looking for, if it is, let’s have a conversation.
Thinking about hiring a podcast manager? Know your recording style.
I want to jump in with your recording style. The very first thing I want you to be considering is your recording style, the rhythm in which you move through your show because this is a huge indicator of the kind of team you’re going to want to work with. I know that some podcasters love being ahead, so they’re batching in big chunks, then not recording for huge chunks of time, then batching in huge chunks. If that’s the style you want to work with, cool. We would be a great fit for you. Several of our clients are that way. We love working ahead. We actually built our whole system, so our clients episodes are due four weeks before they’re going to be released. That way, we not only have time to get it produced but our clients have time to do the necessary prep as far as getting emails written and social posts scheduled. All of those marketing pieces are ready to go.
On the flip side, maybe you’re somebody who wants to record every single week. They just want to record one episode every week. That’s the rhythm they’ve been on. That’s the rhythm they want to stay on. Cool. Make sure though that you sit down and you work out your timing with your team. We also have clients like this. Now, they still have due dates of four weeks before an episode releases but instead of having one due date for a month’s worth of episodes, they have due dates every single week and they’re just run four weeks ahead of what their release schedule would be. That way, they can keep rolling with a weekly schedule, a weekly recording session and we still stay ahead, and they still stay batched. It’s awesome.
Another way you might work is where you record and release, record and release. You’re not looking to be a whole lot ahead on your show. You like to be in the moment. You want to be recording, releasing, promoting, all at the same time because you are shooting from the hip or sharing what feels really in the moment for you. Also totally doable. This one though is where you’re going to have a harder time finding a team, especially a larger team. For example, with our model, this is really, really impossible because, in the course of producing a show, we have four to five people touch every show. Every episode that goes out, four to five people on our team touch it, so to do that in a couple of days is quite hard. However, if you are just working with an editor and you have a very specific rhythm, you know your show goes out on, let’s say Friday and you record them on, let’s say Monday or Tuesday and you know that, and your editor knows that, so they’ve just got that Tuesday time ready to edit and release your show for you or edit, and get it back to you, so you can release it. That’s completely possible.
However, you’re going to want to find a support team, be it a person or an agency, that understands that that’s what you want to do and can work on a similar schedule. Your recording style is super, super important. When we talk about recording style though, we’re not just talking about your frequency of actually getting recorded but what you are handing over to your editor. Are you looking to have someone just clean up general audio quality, remove pops and clicks, and mix in your intro, outro, any promos that you have? Are you looking for someone to help edit content from a story perspective, so they’re actually going in and cutting out lines or cleaning up places where you flubbed? Are you handing over something where you’ve got a break? We have some clients who clap, we have some clients who pause but we generally get audios from our clients where there are some flubs. There are some things we need to tweak, so our team goes through and we clean those things up.
That however is something you need to ask about because not every editor is the same. You’re going to want to be really clear on what you want to hand over and what you want to get back. That’s going to be really, really important for you to understand about your style. I, for example, am not somebody who super likes to have to reset or restart. So often, I’ll just pause or I’ll clap or I will create some change in the waveforms so that we can pretty quickly go through and edit those, and clean them up. You can see where I wanted to start and stop but I know that and my team knows that. We know that about our clients. It’s important for you to understand that about yourself and your editor to understand it.
Thinking about hiring a podcast manager? Know your podcast goals.
I want you to be considering when you’re hiring support this year, what are your goals? What are the goals for your podcast? Because different goals are going to need different kinds of support. If your goal this year is to increase your listenership, is to get more people listening because you want to be able to sell merch or you want to be able to sell ads or you want to be able to create partnership opportunities or attract a different guests or sell your show to somebody, whatever it may be, then you’re going to have different goals than somebody who’s looking to see better marketing results from their show. They’re trying to sell a service or a product, so they’re looking to take the audience they have and get them to do a specific thing. Yes, maybe grow their show but also grow their show with a very specific person. Not just more people.
Again, your goals are going to be different. It’s really important that you understand the kind of shows, whoever you hire works with. For example, that second show would be a much better fit for us than the first show. We don’t tend to work with shows where selling ad space is the goal. Our shows for our clients are genuinely content marketing. It’s 100% a tool to sell their service, their program, their coaching packages, whatever the case may be. That’s how we approach show development. That’s how we approach strategy. That’s how we approach the decisions that we’re making with our hosts. Those are going to be different. A show where you’re looking to get massive audience reach so that you can sell ad spots or sell your show completely to a larger podcasting group, 100%, not a bad plan. I’m just not the girl to get you there because it’s not what I do. It’s really, really, really important that you have a clear understanding of the goals for your show and ask everybody who you’re sitting down with, and talking to, “What are the goals for the shows you work with? What do you consider to be an important end result of the work we do together?” That’s critical.
Thinking about hiring a podcast manager? Know your budget.
The third thing is your budget. I don’t mean this like, “Oh well, if you don’t have a certain budget, you’re just not going to be offered any help at all.” No. Understand that the kind of support you have can grow with you. I have said this so many times but I’m going to say it again, the bulk of the shows we work with are not launches. Most of the shows we work with are right around a year old. Sometimes, a little less, sometimes, six or eight months, sometimes, a little longer, sometimes 18 or even 24 months but generally speaking, they’re somewhere around that one-year anniversary of launching their show. They either DIY’d when they started or maybe they had an editor that they hired through something like Fiverr or Upwork where it was very much so contractual, project-based, “Here’s the audio. Clean them up and I will get them back.” They kept it simple. They didn’t have a ton of support with show notes, graphics, audiograms, and all of the things we do because that’s not where the best use of their budget was yet. They were choosing to invest more time instead of money. That’s totally okay. But understand what your budget is.
I breezed past something and I really want to circle back to it. This idea of both your time and your money. You’re going to be spending both of those things. If you decide to podcast, you are going to spend both time and money. It’s just the way it is but you get to decide what the percentage is. I choose to spend more money than time on this show at this point because I just record it and my team goes in and does all of the production. They’re editing. They’re creating the transcripts. They’re getting the show notes ready. They’re getting everything uploaded and scheduled. The same thing we do for our clients happens to this show. That wasn’t always the case. For a very long time, I did all of it myself.
My time budget was higher than my money budget. You need to understand for you right now—and again, this is not for all time necessarily—but for you right now, what do you have more of? If you have more time than you have money, great. Maybe it’s quarter or annual strategy calls with a strategist who can help you make the decisions for your show. Maybe it is an editor to help you be producing the cleanest best quality audio than you can right now. Maybe it is some support around getting guest bookings on other shows so that you can find a larger audience for your show. Maybe it is a VA or admin person who can help you in marketing your show. I often recommend this before you get help in producing your show because there’s really no sense in producing a show that no one’s listening to, so you got to make sure you get people to listen to it, but make sure that whatever it is right now, it’s in alignment with how you want to be spending both your time and your money.
For me, I started investing money and having my team help me get the show produced so that I could reallocate my time budget elsewhere so that I could spend more time marketing the show so that I could spend more time being over on other people’s podcasts and sitting down for some of those conversations. But you need to be clear on your budget right now. What do you have in the timebank? What do you have in the money bank to be investing in the production and marketing of your show, of this asset? That’s absolutely the most important.
Ready to hire a podcast manager right now? Reach out!
If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more about making some of these decisions or some ways that can be helpful in clarifying when it’s time to get the support or the kind of support to get, I want to point you to a couple of shows.
When It’s Time to Get Professional Support With Your Podcast
This talks about the things that you need to have an understanding of in your business before you should be looking at any kind of support. We’re going to talk about things like the questions you need to be asking yourself and be able to answer before it’s a worthwhile investment for you. That’s a good one. I will link to it in the description.
3 Signs It’s Time To Hire Support For Your Podcast
I like this show because it’s a really good way to start recognizing some of the red flags or maybe even yellow flags that have been waving themselves in front of you when you’re podcasting and going like, “Please stop this.”
Who Should You Hire to Produce Your Podcast?
This episode we’re talking about the different options, the different kinds of people who you could be hiring. Again, whether it’s a team like us, freelancers, or more of a virtual assistant situation, it’s going to be really helpful in clarifying what you’re right fit right now is.
If you’re reading to this going, “Stacey, what are you even talking about? I want to hire you immediately because you are incredible and your team is too,” then head over to here and hit the button that says Chat with Uncommonly More, and book a time for you and I to sit down and chat.
