Growing a Podcast More Than 40% in a Year With Tara Newman

Stacey Harris: What would it mean to grow your podcast more than 40% in just 12 months? Today I'm joined by Tara Newman, a really good friend of mine and a long-time client, and we're going to talk about doing exactly that with her show last year. Let's get into it.

Welcome to The More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris. I'm Stacey. This is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your more profitable podcast. My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team, because your show should be built to generate and convert leads. So let's get into it.

Alright, I've got Tara Newman with me now. Hi, Tara.

Tara Newman: Hey, how are you, Stace?

Stacey Harris: I'm good. I told everyone in the intro but I feel like there probably should be layers of warning. You and I have known each other for a long time. We're very good friends.

Tara Newman: Yes, by the way, happy birthday.

Stacey Harris: Thank you. We're recording this on my birthday. This is the one thing I'm doing for work today and then I'm offline but I had to talk to you on my birthday. We're good friends in real life so this has the potential to get unwieldy because we enjoy talking to each other. We're going to do our best to stay somewhere close to the time frame we're talking about.

Tara Newman: We're going to land the plane.

Stacey Harris: There we go. We promise now at some point we will in fact land the plane. I want you to tell one of my favorite stories ever, which is I want you to tell me the story of launching your podcast because you have such a good example of like, “I'm going to do this thing, this is exciting,” and “Oh, wow, I did that thing.”

Tara Newman: Sure. Actually, I love the whole how I started, why I started my podcast and I think it speaks to even though I started my podcast way back in 2017, not as far back as when you started your podcast, but in 2017 when I started my podcast, I was probably about two years into my business, almost three years into my business, I will say I was at the six-figure revenue mark in my business. I feel like this is important information. My biggest struggle was social media, which Stacey was already supporting me on my struggles with social media.

Stacey Harris: [All the days] of Facebook group calls.

Tara Newman: Yes. I had a business coach who's like, “You have to start a Facebook group,” but gave no direction as to the purpose, the process, or the payoff in my three Ps to starting a Facebook group. It was just like start a Facebook group, invite people. That became like a very ragtag group of people situation, not always my ideal client and I was having a really hard time maintaining my energy while outputting into that group and feeling like I wasn't really getting enough of a return.

I think part of it is because I hated it so much that the level of return that I would have had to get would have been so significant. It was starting to become like you can't even pay me enough to show up here.

Stacey Harris: I want to stop you right there because I think that is such a good point. I think that applies to podcasts. I say this a lot to people who want to launch a podcast because someone told them to. We're talking about it in the frame of Facebook group but the same applies to a podcast. The same applies to LinkedIn lives. The same applies to a TikTok channel.

If it is a big lift for you because you freaking hate it, you're never going to see the ROI you want because there is not a return big enough to outweigh the fact that you freaking hate doing it.

Tara Newman: Don't do it. In 2017, I'd actually been creating content online since 2008 with my first blog, and through blogging, I'd really learned a lot about marketing because when you write something, then you want people to read it, and how to use social media to get more eyeballs on your content.

I just really started to not like the game, the social media game. It felt really draining and exhausting and it felt hard to separate my own inability to control my behavior around it. Basically saying like I can't control the addiction. I can't control the scroll when I'm there. It just pulls me in and pulls me in and I don't like who I become. I don't like the time I spend there. I'm such a better person for not being on social media.

At the same time, it's a really great tool to potentially get some exposure for your business. I don't think it's the democratization of advertising that everybody once thought it was but I also can't say it hasn't helped me. But I wanted to spend less time there and so that was the whole purpose of starting a podcast.

As a matter of fact, while I was planning the start of the podcast, we closed the Facebook group and really focused my time and energy on starting the podcast. I spent a number of months, probably three months, just really getting clear on the purpose, my purpose for the podcast, my why, my reasons because I knew that it was going to get challenging and I knew that it wasn't going to be the easiest thing I've ever done.

I wanted to be clear too that it was a long-term play and what were some of the benefits to doing this that went beyond maybe the tangible like this turning into a way to convert clients, it had to have other value to me beyond it translating to dollars eventually.

Stacey Harris: I think that's such an important reminder about that long play though. Nothing is going to happen crazy in your podcast in the first 6 weeks of it, or even the first 12 weeks of it. You're listening currently to somebody who's been podcasting for 5 years and 10 years. It won't take 5 years or 10 years but we can safely say these things work now because we've been in them for a while.

Tara Newman: Yeah. A lot of it for me was around just personal development: speaking, creating content at a different level, learning about the medium, learning how to communicate my thoughts and my ideas in a way that was engaging and inspired people to keep coming back, to listen more. It was about writing the chapters of my one-day book and speaking them into a podcast.

It was about really finding my work, the meaning around my work, and the people who I wanted to support. There was a lot that went into it for me and I'm just somebody who tends to make meaning out of everything.

Stacey Harris: You’re not wrong but I think it’s still a good point.

Tara Newman: Which probably leads me to the part of the story that you love best, so we decide to do this podcast. We initially did it in seasons because it was a test, like, “Can I show up and create these episodes in a way that didn't strain me or burn me out? How can we test it?”

We did two seasons, I think we did initially two seasons of like 12 episodes and I'm fairly certain that I had 8 to 10 episodes in the bank before we even launched the podcast because batching is life, shoot it into my veins. That's how I feel about it.

Stacey Harris: Yes, yes, yes.

Tara Newman: I launched the podcast but here's the thing, I've been creating content long enough to know that you just don't put something out into the world. Whatever you create, you have to sell, whether it's free, whether it's low dollar, whether it's premium service. Whatever you create, you have to sell.

If you can't sell the thing you've created, then don't go and create something else because the likelihood of you being able to sell that is going to be slim to none. It's never the offer, it's never the opt-in, it's never the podcast, it's your ability to sell the thing. It really pushed me way the heck out of my comfort zone to go and now promote this podcast in the first handful of days that it had been up.

At the time, I had a belief, one that still surfaces, just last week about reviews. Back in this time, nobody really knew—we still don't know but now we don't care—but back in 2017, it was very attractive to potentially make some kind of iTunes list.

Stacey Harris: The New and Noteworthy.

Tara Newman: New and Noteworthy. No one really knew how the heck that happened.

Stacey Harris: Still don't.

Tara Newman: Still don't, but now nobody cares. Do we care? I don't care. Do people actually care about this now?

Stacey Harris: Lots of people do, lots of people do, which is why I'm glad you're saying this because I get questions about it every week. Someone listening to this right now is like, “New and Noteworthy, did she get on New and Noteworthy? Did it change your show?” Yes, she did. No, it didn't.

Tara Newman: Yeah. I actually think if you're on New and Noteworthy, maybe it's actually the wrong sign of your show working.

Stacey Harris: All it led to me getting was really bad pitches for podcast guests.

Tara Newman: Yeah, okay. Anyway though, you're enamored and you want to make it on this New and Noteworthy and I saw that a lot of people that had made it on New and Noteworthy had a tremendous amount of reviews on their podcast, so I was initially pushing really hard for reviews but I don't regret that because it actually got word out about the podcast. We did get a tremendous amount of reviews. I think I wound up with like 40 reviews in the first week or two of the show.

Stacey Harris: That's awesome.

Tara Newman: Yeah. Now we're in year five and I haven't even doubled that. I'm probably around 70 reviews.

Stacey Harris: They really only matter at the beginning and that's more than anything so that you get early feedback that people do give a sh*t that this is happening.

Tara Newman: Yeah, and asking people to share and asking people to listen, just the whole thing about having my voice out there, having my thoughts heard, holding space, and being a solo podcaster is a whole thing unto itself. You don't get to hide. There is no hiding when you do that and then having to stretch myself and really ask for and sell this free podcast that I had created threw me under the covers for a good solid week, like crying in tears, could not function, and get my nervous system regulated, just under the covers collapse.

Stacey Harris: Which is not uncommon, and I'm just emphasizing the points you're making at this point because they're really important, I tell people all the time, we call it a launch because it is. I don't care that it's a free podcast and not a six-figure offer. Guess what, it's still going to take the lift of getting it in front of people and that's a huge energetic output on the back of sitting in your office, talking to your computer for X number of weeks, trying to get the show produced before you get to tell anybody about it.

Tara Newman: Yeah. I wasn't at the earliest stage in my business. I've seen people start podcasts before they even really have income coming in. I said my business was probably about six figures at the time, I was maybe almost at the three-year mark but things were still chaotic just in running a business and trying to figure out what my secret sauce was, what my messaging was, what worked in terms of lead generation and converting those leads to sales.

It was just like a super messy time in my life because of that. Getting the business off the ground as well as then the podcast. There was just so much emotion. I remember that first week, I'm collapsed under the covers and my husband and I were eating dinner. John sits down and he's like, “I listened to your podcast. Sounds like you're in a tin can.”

He almost died by fork, really I wanted to stab him. I was so raw. I was so emotionally raw, spent, and tired of even just focusing on something for a solid 90 days and not taking my focus off of that. I was like, “D*mn you. I didn't want to have to hear that,” but I was recording on my Blue Snowball mic. I didn't really give any sh*ts about my tech or anything like that so fist bump to 2017 Tara who just did it dirty.

Stacey Harris: You and I have had this conversation but I'm going to say it again because I want everyone to know this, that's often a really good way to start. There's a reason that the bulk of the podcasters that we work with, quite frankly at this point, possibly moving forward, all of them, have already had a show for a while because you need to know, “Okay, cool. I'm willing to keep doing this because it is a lift. I just need to do it with some help.”

We do very few launches because most often, the best way to launch your show is dirty. Maybe bring somebody in to help you with the editing. Absolutely, I understand that that can feel like a huge, huge technical lift but the components are not terribly complicated. Figure it out, start talking, and then bring in real ongoing production support.

The only really support I really highly recommend at launch is strategic support and that's just because then you have somebody who can help you identify “Where do I need to start? What do I need to say?” because that will shut you up faster than anything else is the “What do I need to say? What should I say?” question.

Outside of that, make production easy on yourself because it is a huge energetic lift to get those first couple of seasons out. You did two seasons before I stepped in 2018 and took over production, right?

Tara Newman: Mm-hmm.

Stacey Harris: What about that time outside of the fact that I reached out and said, “Hey, I'm launching an agency, do you want to be our first client?” what about that made it the right time for you to really upgrade the way you were being supported with the show?

Tara Newman: Was that the conversation we had where you had already done a strategy for me and then you came back and was like, “I'm starting an agency,” and I was like, “Thank God”?

Stacey Harris: It was exactly the conversation and we were like, “Yeah, we're going to have a conversation next Friday,” and 24 hours later you emailed me and we're like, “I don't actually want to have a conversation. I just want you to do this. Can we just have a conversation saying you're doing it? I don't actually want to discuss if you're going to do it.” That was that conversation. That was the start of Uncommonly More.

Tara Newman: Yeah. That was summer of 2018. I had done two seasons and I think that I was editing and I'll never forget somebody messaging me and they're like, “You're about to see something really important and then it cut out. Do you know what you're about to say?”

Stacey Harris: And I know you well enough to know the answer to that question is no.

Tara Newman: And I'm like, “I should probably really just hire an editor because my skill set is just not there.” Then you came on and we made some pretty big changes right away.

Stacey Harris: Yeah, we made some big wholesale changes right up front.

Tara Newman: Yeah. You took the show from season to being seasons to being weekly. One, I had recorded enough episodes to know that I wanted to continue recording episodes, I had recorded enough episodes in the framework of a season to know that it's actually hard to stop and start again, it's easier to just keep things going week after week after week, and it was going to be way easier having you there just holding that frame of we're doing it weekly, here's the pacing, here's what you need to get to me, they're coming.

Then you took all the work off of it. You were like, “I'm editing it. I'm uploading it,” all the stuff that you do on the other side of it so it took so much off my plate that I could record and make sure that we had episodes going out on a weekly basis.

Stacey Harris: That's a great point. It's funny, and I out myself on this probably not as frequently as I should, but we launched the agency and started producing shows for other people in 2018. I was doing everything in 2018. We brought on an editor in either late 2019 or early 2020, Lauri joined me as an editor and it still took me until the middle of 2020 to hand over my show even though at that point, I had handed over all of our client’s shows, it took me a while to hand over my show.

I was like, “Well, the priority is client work. I'll mess with my stuff over here,” and finally, I handed over my show. That moment of having the only task be that I needed to sit at this mic and say stuff made sitting at this mic and saying stuff so monumentally easier because I didn’t have the mental load of all the tasks that came next.

Tara Newman: Oh, yeah. The second you came on, I dropped all that sh*t like a hot potato. I'm like, “Here you go.”

Stacey Harris: I remember, I was there. It's a really good feeling. I'm glad that you mentioned I gave you the capacity to just sit down and record. Now that you've done both seasons and weekly for a while, does weekly still feel like an easier lift?

Tara Newman: It depends. Listen, we all ebb and flow. We all go through seasons so I'll say overall, yes. Let me just share more things that you do that I think are relevant to this conversation. In 2018, we then started getting strategic with the podcast in terms of lining up content around what we were selling and when we were selling it, which happened to coincide with just some of my own clarity around needing to educate my ideal clients on what it was like to work with me.

I think those things just came together in this perfect storm that really allowed the podcast to take off and to start really probably by 2019 converting leads. Not immediately, this stuff takes time which is important to acknowledge, it could take six months at least, but by the time we went to fill the mastermind at the end of 2019 for 2020, which was probably the second time we had done that together, it was easy and effortless. It sold out so quickly. It was the easiest thing I ever did.

Stacey Harris: Yeah, and some of that was using episodes we had actually released in 2018 when we were selling the 2019 membership. We re-released some of those 2018 episodes so we took some of that lift off in 2019. The only thing we did in 2019 was we added some fresh case study episodes from that 2019, I'm going to call them class, so in the mastermind, that group.

That's part of what made that an easier lift. I think that's important to acknowledge too. Part of the reason that time makes this all work better, time makes this all feel easier is you start to get to reuse some of those assets. It’s part of the reason weekly still works for us so we repurpose.

Tara Newman: You walked right into my next point, which was you really co-pilot on so well, and I don't even have to think about it and you save me so much time, effort, and energy, around what we're repurposing and when. Having a handle on that repurposing schedule and being like, “Okay, if we repurpose and we do this and we do this, then this is how many episodes we need for the year,” and when are we recording them?

Then this year, we decided to add some interviews on the podcast even though it's a solo show mainly because I want to use giving people access to my platform as a relationship-building tool. These are people who I invited on because I either have an established relationship with them or I want to establish a relationship with them. This is going to be the first year where we have really consistent and regular case studies going live.

Stacey Harris: Yep, we've got monthly ones this year.

Tara Newman: Yeah, and then repurposing so when we looked at the podcast schedule and we were like, “Oh, well, this is all we need to create,” it was like, “Oh, I've never created less content in my life and it feels really good.”

Stacey Harris: Yeah, all in, you'll probably create maybe 15 new episodes this year.

Tara Newman: Yeah. I think that's really important because there's somehow this myth, I don't know how we get here, but there's just this myth that we’re these never-ending sources of creation. I am a creative person. I consider my number one strength in the business as being in a creative role. We create a ton of content.

We switched over the years to really primarily creating for our program The Bold Profit Academy but then there is that forward-facing content on the podcast, then that gets repurposed onto social, and things like that. Over the last few years, as we were building out The Bold Profit Academy, I really started to get burned out mentally on the creation like nobody can create like this.

We're asking superhuman powers of people that I think are harmful to how our brains work, to mental health, to fatigue, to all those things. So really getting serious about what the schedule looked like this year is going to be health-saving.

Stacey Harris: I think you bring up a good point is we don't think about the content we're creating for programs, whether you're doing one-on-one coaching, you've got a group program, a mastermind, a membership, or whatever it looks like, even service providers like me, a lot is created.

I spend a lot of time in creation that's not this podcast because I'm co-creating with clients and helping them with the lift in their own shows but also we're creating things like The Podcast Newsroom and trainings that I'll go in and do in other people's programs. All of that is also content creation. That's more stuff that we have to creatively show up for. I think so often, we only think of content creation as being blog posts, podcasts, videos, social media, which on its own is a lot.

Tara Newman: It is. But I think there's a real value in having you sitting co-pilot on this because we're clear every year about the assets that we're building out so we can repurpose them in lots of different ways, not just as repeat episodes on the podcast. Plus, you're looking at the data in a way that is way deeper than how I'm looking at it and you're able to really see those trends.

When you first took over the show, do you remember that? You said, “You know, Tara, it's called The Bold leadership Revolution, talking about leadership things, but your highest downloaded podcasts are when you talk about money and mindset.” I was just like, “Hahaha. I'm just going to keep ignoring that and talking about other things and not talking about money.”

Stacey Harris: Then three years later, maybe four years later, she got Profit First certified.

Tara Newman: No, it wasn't that long. It didn’t take me that long. It was 2020.

Stacey Harris: In theory. No, but when did you get Profit First certified, 2020?

Tara Newman: Mm-hmm, 2020.

Stacey Harris: What springs to mind that I'm talking about was a few years later, it was last year 2022, we did the six-week, eight-week money series. The episodes I have been asking, I was like, “Oh, my god, this is my favorite series ever.”

I want to talk a little bit about data because there is some very cool data that we have for your show. You grew your show 45% last year. Do you know how much of your show last year was fresh episodes versus re-releases?

Tara Newman: I don't, you do probably. We repurposed a lot last year.

Stacey Harris: We re-released roughly a third, maybe 40% of your show last year were re-releases. Let me just say, not re-releases that you went in and re-recorded, I mean straight re-releases. We took the episode, honestly, even when we re-release sometimes, we'll go in and polish. We'll remove something that's maybe not relevant anymore. But for the most part, we really just went, “Okay, here you go again,” and still saw growth in your show of 45%.

Tara Newman: Yeah, that's wild.

Stacey Harris: Repurposing is a gift to your audience because we saw 45%. That means 45% of the people listening to your show hadn't heard anything you've done before and we release new shows weekly. There's not a lot of time to go back through a catalog of 100+ episodes. I think we just hit 200 with your show I want to say.

Tara Newman: No, it's been a while.

Stacey Harris: That's a lot of content to go back through.

Tara Newman: Oh, you know what, we did just hit 200, we hit 200 in the fall of 2022.

Stacey Harris: Yeah, I thought so. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff there. No one's going to go back and find those things. Take those assets and be re-sharing them, they are not going to inhibit your growth, they are going to encourage your growth because we were able to release a third of the shows that we knew were going to work. We didn’t have to go, “I hope this lands.”

Tara Newman: Can I tell them another funny story?

Stacey Harris: Oh, please do.

Tara Newman: Okay. It's July of 2022 and I'm absolutely convinced I've been blacklisted from the internet.

Stacey Harris: Oh, my God. Just tell the story.

Tara Newman: Okay. This went on for eight weeks. I’m like, “Stacey, have we been canceled? Are you sure that the website's working? Is Libsyn uploading to the podcast players?” and finally, in a fit of hysteria, I think it was in August, I'm like, “Stacey, I have been canceled. I have to be blacklisted somewhere. Find it.”

You're like, “Tara, I keep telling you. This happens every year. I don't believe you,” like chewed up about it, it consumed way too much of my mental space over the summer and then I go and look at the data on the statistics, first of all, it was so comical because last year was such an outlier for us in growth, on the chart, like the 2022 line was so far above 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, it was ridiculous like whatever.

Then yes, we saw a precipitous drop in downloads in July, August but still not below where it was the year before so still seeing some growth there. But then you can actually see that every year, the podcast dips in July and August except in 2020 where we actually got a spike, which makes sense because people were in lockdown and it was summer and they were by that point stir-crazy and probably losing their minds out of boredom.

Stacey Harris: We also had a lot of content over that 2020 summer. That was very time specific. We responded very quickly to that where a lot of shows didn't. We picked up some places where other shows left off because a lot of shows were running business as usual and we really spoke to what was happening right then.

Tara Newman: Yeah, oh gosh, yeah.

Stacey Harris: That was the other factor. But absolutely, every August, and you do this annually, it was more severe last year but you do this annually, right about the end of August as you're getting ready to come back from sabbatical, “The show is dead, no one listens to it, it's over. We've been canceled,” and then I go, “Could you please just give me to like September 10th?”

Because generally by September 10th, we've outdone August numbers because no one listens to your show in the summer. I don't know, maybe we should just take it off. I don't know because we really do every year. But that's one of the reasons I love data. We joke a lot, and maybe people who listen to my show don't know this, but you and I joke a lot about my distaste for feelings because I’m not a feelings girl.

My favorite thing about data is to be like, “Let me give your feelings some facts.” This is why I like data better than feelings because it doesn't matter how you feel about your show. Let me look at the numbers and your show probably works almost universally. Your show works better than you think it does.

Tara Newman: Yeah. Can we also just have a moment and say over the last two years, so 2021 and 2022, the show grew 60%, like 65% because the year before, we had really good growth too. We've had growth every year but the last two years have just been epic.

Stacey Harris: Even this year, this January 2023 was up almost 50% over January 2022. It's still happening.

Tara Newman: Yeah. January was one of our three highest downloaded months in the last 13 months. It was a good month. I just want to share that this is such a long game. You either have to be all in or get out. Try it, see if you like it, and then if you like it, you have to go all in.

Going all in is budgeting resources to making it a high-quality show, placing a strategy behind it to make sure that it converts leads, tracking things, measuring things, and being in a continuous improvement cycle around, “Okay, we have a great show, not how can we do something else now, but how can we make the show even better?” so strengthen the strength and it will be a big success. It just takes time. I think there were certain things that we've done but I think some of it has just been time.

Stacey Harris: Absolutely. I want to point out that it wasn't until the show hit these growth numbers that you saw results in sales. It's been across this that you've started to see, like we were talking about 2018, the podcast was a big part of selling out the mastermind earlier than you ever had before.

Tara Newman: When you came on, our other favorite story, when you came on is when we started using the podcast more strategically around what we were selling. The first thing that we were selling, and I think some of the strategic content on the podcast was around The BRAVE Society, which is now The Bold Profit Academy.

Stacey Harris: Yeah. I was hoping we'd also get to tell this story. It is my favorite.

Tara Newman: You want to tell the story?

Stacey Harris: No, I like when you tell it. When I tell it, I sound manipulative. When you tell it, I sound really smart.

Tara Newman: Listen, it would be a huge farce if I let anybody believe that my business is successful as it is today based on my own merits. I am one part of the equation and there are a number of people on my team that have been with me for a long time that go into making my business a success, Stacey being one of them.

I don't think that this podcast would be here consistently the way it is if I didn't have that support in keeping the show going. Stacey's here to support the energy and the effort that goes into that show. When we started, Stacey was just telling me what to do. Stacey's a great decider. Stacey may make more decisions in my business than I do at this point.

She's like, “Okay, Tara, create this piece of content. Okay, Tara, record this. Okay, Tara, talk about this,” and I'm just doing it. I'm not even thinking about what I'm doing. I'm just following what she's telling me to do. Lesson, when you hire people who are the experts, just listen to them. Don't hire them, then fight them, and not listen to them because that's just a giant waste of everybody's time and a huge waste of your money.

Here I am, blindly following Stacey off a cliff, and Lane, the other person on my team, messages me and she's like, “Are you launching something?” and I'm like, “I don't know. Why?” and she's like, “Well, I'm seeing all this activity coming on the forward facing of the business and it looks like you're in the middle of a launch but you haven't told me to be prepared for anything.” I run over to Slack, Stacey and I'm like, “Are we launching something? Do you know anything about this?”

Stacey Harris: Spoiler alert, I did.

Tara Newman: Because I would have never done any of that on my own. It would have been so stuck in my head. I would have been so stuck in perfecting. I would have never gotten all those steps out and implemented if it wasn't for Stacey just being like, “Don't think, just do.” I think what happened was that then I had to introduce you to Lane and then you had to explain to her that we were launching.

Stacey Harris: We were by the way a full week into launching The BRAVE Society. We had a sales page, we had content, we have social content. Now, in fairness, you and I still, and at that time, worked differently than I do with most of the podcasts we produce. I was doing the social, email, I do the tech stuff inside of your business.

You and I worked together in another way, which made it a little easier for me to sneak a launch in. But yeah, it was a full week into our launch. We had by the way already sold spots. We had people enroll before anyone else on the team realized. We were in fact selling something.

Tara Newman: Oh, the early days.

Stacey Harris: The best. Now that could never happen.

Tara Newman: I want to promise everybody that we really have our sh*t way more together now.

Stacey Harris: We do. Honestly, I think we had our sh*t pretty together then, okay? Only one person needs to have the sh*t together for the sh*ts to be together.

Tara Newman: That’s true. That’s a core value of our team at this point.

Stacey Harris: As long as someone's in charge, the rest of us will be fine and all of us have our things we're in charge of so that nobody has to hold the whole basket. I think it's awesome. I think it's perfect. I love it.

Tara Newman: I think it's important to note too that really frees me up to just go and serve my clients.

Stacey Harris: I'm glad you mentioned that because that's exactly where I wanted to wrap us up with is one of the ways we know your show works is yes, we see 60% download growth over two years. That's awesome. However, the actual way we know your show works is tell me the last time you had a sales call where the podcast didn't come up.

Tara Newman: Oh, gosh, yeah.

Stacey Harris: I like when they just say stuff from the podcast back to you.

Tara Newman: Yes. My sales calls are basically I think people just wanting to make sure that the voice behind the microphone is actually attached to a body and isn't some weird deep fake.

Stacey Harris: Which is possible, honestly.

Tara Newman: It is possible. People just get on sales calls with me and they'll be like, “I want the results that Marie had. I want the results that Sarah had. I want the results that so and so had. I want to have the experience that Lisa had.” They're very ready to pay me and to join the programs, that took a little time, but that was definitely starting within six months of us working together with the podcast and then we just have dialed it in and dialed it in and dialed it in.

We know what really works and it's made things so much easier. It’s also my business card, so people refer people to my podcast and it's at the point where last summer, I had maybe two or three sales calls with people who actually happened to have been local who had been referred to me but never listened to the podcast.

For the first time in a very long time, those sales calls didn't convert. Not because they didn't want to work with me but because I didn't want to work with them. The reason why I declined working with them was because they just weren't in the right frame of mind, they weren't in the right stage of their own development to work on the things that we would need to work on.

The podcast really does prepare people and get them in a frame of mind that makes them very open and receptive to getting the results that they want to get through working with me.

Stacey Harris: I love that. I want to start wrapping us up with exactly that. That's one of my favorite benefits of a podcast is for lack of a more elegant way to say this, training people to do the work and take the action inside of the work with you. Part of the reason that I talk so transparently on this podcast about what our process looks like is because I want our clients to have a really good understanding of what showing up for the work looks like.

I understand that I'm going to hand a bunch of this stuff off to the UM team, what do I still hold on to? What is still my responsibility in this? How am I going to show up and get my best results?

I want you to know that before we ever start working together so that when we start working together, we're super clear on who's who, what needs to happen, and everything just moves a lot easier so I'm really glad you brought that up because I think it's really true. It helps answer some of those early-stage questions that we would see in The Bold Profit Academy or you'd see in your one-to-one work. You can get that out of the way because they've already managed those things through what they learned on the show.

Tara Newman: Yeah, it works if you do your show properly, if you have a proper strategy behind your show, it is a second person, it is a second sales person on your team because you're probably doing the sales and then the podcast is going to be a salesperson as well because you're going to be keeping people going through your content in a way that walks them through your sales process.

Stacey Harris: I love that. As we wrap up, is there anything else you want to leave them with?

Tara Newman: You should all just hire Stacey.

Stacey Harris: It's exactly what I wanted you to say. Very good job. I love that. I love your show. Thank you for coming on and talking about this because I think these are some really important pieces. As we wrap up, I want to remind you, I want to remind anyone listening what your show looks like working is lots of things, it's not just downloads.

If there's something you don't like about your show now, if there's something that feels like a really big lift in your show, you can probably solve it by having a plan, a strategy will go a long way to solving that paired with some support so let's have a conversation. But yeah, thank you, Tara, for joining me.

Tara Newman: Thanks for having me on.

Stacey Harris: And we'll see you next time.

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