Building Better Tech with Colleen Reidelbach, CRO at Acklen Avenue

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today Joel is talking to Colleen, the Chief Revenue Officer at Acklen Avenue and the host of the Build Better Tech podcast. And they discuss how to keep things fresh when you've been at the same job for a while, learnings from interviewing many tech leaders, and tips for getting started with a podcast. Stay tuned after the episode for a preview of the Build Better Tech podcast. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. I was scrolling through LinkedIn and I saw this post where you interviewed this individual who I think was lead engineer, was somehow responsible for Siri. And I was like, look at this other tech podcast. And so I researched it, reached out, or you reached out, didn't you?

(Colleen at 00:01:08) I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) Isn't that how it works? Yeah. So, sorry, I do a lot of these. So you reached out to me and then I looked up your profile and I saw the Siri guy. I was like, oh, this is awesome. She is doing interviews with these tech leaders. She's getting well-known tech leaders. And I didn't know how long you had been doing it. I saw that you, when did you start it?

(Colleen at 00:01:28) Fall of 2019. I was getting ready to, I was going to be going on maternity leave. And, well, the big reason I started the podcast was because in my role at Acklen Avenue, which is a software development company out of Nashville, I was getting to meet these leaders who just happen to be working in technology, CTOs, CIOs, who at, you know, influential companies. And you don't reach that stage in a company and in your career without having something considerable to say about leadership and about how to do technology really well, you know, the intersection of business and technology, to have a lot to say about business strategy and understand technology's role within that. And I wanted, I just was having really interesting conversations with these men and women and wanted to provide a platform for it. I was like, these are people that have something to say, and I'd love to help them to share it. Of course, excellent podcasts like yours exist.

(Colleen at 00:02:31) And, but I was really interested in the business angle. And so I, you know, decided to just see what I could make happen, and I was getting ready to go on maternity leave and wanted something that I could kind of work on and get out into the world while I was taking kind of a quieter season personally. And it was great. You know? My library is much smaller than yours, Joel, but it's been good. It's been, I'm really proud of the folks that I've been able to connect with. Most recently, Brendan Eich, the CTO of Zoom, was on in a bonus episode this fall. I'm recording season, like a full season two right now with some really fantastic guests that are going to be, I mean, honestly, I'm just, you know, I'm still a little blown over that they were even, that they, you know, had time for me. But it's been super fun and really proud of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:26) Yeah. That was another good thing that came out of the pandemic is people got better audio-video setups at home and got much more comfortable with doing conversations remotely. And so that opened up a lot more people to doing these types of things.

(Colleen at 00:03:42) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny you say that because I was very much like a loyalist in-person interviews, especially for folks that I didn't know. As you know, it's very easy to develop rapport with someone face to face, and I just loved the spirit of conversations that it was able to create. And so it's been a little bit of a, I still am really proud of the content that, you know, that we've been able to create. I miss the in-person. And to the extent that I am going to continue to do in-persons, then I will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) So your first season was in-person interviews?

(Colleen at 00:04:21) Mhmm. Yep. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) I've done a handful maybe of in-person interviews. Sometimes, like at one point when I was traveling around a lot and doing conferences, I would do some freelance type work where I would interview people and then I wouldn't be in the interview. I would just take the footage from them and make ads and some other stuff. But yeah, it's pretty interesting for me, because I had probably done 100 or 200 of these through Zoom before I did my first in-person one. And you don't have a screen in front of you with a bunch of notes. You have to look at the person in their eyes. And so I found out pretty quickly that what worked for me was I would just, you know, have a sheet of the top couple questions and some bullet points and like have them be very brief and then pray that they're a good talker.

(Colleen at 00:05:18) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I prefer much, like, a very conversational style as well, which I know that you do also. So it's actually easier for me to have a kind of free-flowing conversation with someone in person. I feel a little bit more shackled to my notes when I'm doing a, frankly, doing a Zoom, but it's still lots of fun. And I am getting to meet, like, the next interview that I'm doing, I got to meet him in person recently on a trip. So we were able to build a little bit of background, and I was able to understand more about who he is that I think is going to be really impactful in the interview. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:58) Oh, for sure.

(Colleen at 00:06:00) Yeah. I should say the podcast is called Build Better Tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:03) Yeah. We got to plug the podcast.

(Colleen at 00:06:05) Of course I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:08) Absolutely. So I wasn't even sure what this episode would end up being about, because we always look at the audience and figure out how to try to bring them value the best way possible. And so as we're talking here, I think this episode should be about starting a podcast.

(Colleen at 00:06:24) Oh, gosh. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) Because there's a lot of people out there that'll walk up to me when I was doing conferences and stuff and say, oh, I've been thinking about a podcast. People will reach out to me on LinkedIn. 100% of the time, I don't respond to the people that reach out to me on LinkedIn saying that they're thinking about starting a podcast. But like 100% of the time or 80% of the time when they already have started a podcast, I will. Because there's way more people that talk about it than actually go through with it. And I want to help the people who are, you know, putting in the work and doing it.

(Colleen at 00:06:53) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54) And so in that sort of theme about, you know, starting a podcast, I think if we talked a little bit about that topic, then it would help the next generation of podcasters. And then one of the things I thought was most interesting that you said was, there's lots of great podcasts out like yours, but I still did it. Yeah. There were five CTO podcasts out when I started. I didn't do it because I wanted to compete with the five podcasts or because I couldn't get what I wanted elsewhere. I did it because I wanted to talk to great people and learn from them. And you can't do that any other way than calling them up and having a conversation with them. And you need a good excuse and a podcast is a great excuse. And so that was my idea was, hey, I want to have more relationships. I want to know more people. And then I kind of got addicted to it after I started learning so much.

(Colleen at 00:07:47) Yeah. I would say mine was definitely similar. I wanted to, these were people that I wanted to talk to, and I wanted to have really substantive conversations with. And I was curious about. And in order to justify the ask, it helps if you have something to offer. You know, you've got a platform to offer them. And so I think, you know, some people ask me about starting a podcast as well, and I would just really encourage them to think about what they want out of it. Because if that's what you want, if you're interested in, you know, getting to know people and having substantive conversations with them that you think other people would be interested in, then that is something that you can do. It doesn't take much to do that. If your goal is, you know, I have a business plan, I want sponsorship, I want this much listenership. That's a, I mean, Joel, you could speak to how to get to that goal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:42) 200 episodes. 200 episodes in two years and 200 episodes is, I think that's when I made my first dollar.

(Colleen at 00:08:51) Wow. Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) And $250,000 of my own savings.

(Colleen at 00:08:57) So that's something to think about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:59) Yeah. But I'll tell you this. So I heard Gary Vee talking about it. You know Gary Vaynerchuk, have you ever come across this guy? Okay. So he was saying, he's Mr. Hustle, hustle, hustle, right? So he was saying, you can do it yourself, one-man band. And I was like, that sounds great and all, but I want to cut the curve because he's like, you're going to have to crush it. And it's going to be really hard, like ramen noodle style for the first three, four years. And I thought to myself, okay, that's true. And I have a good work ethic. But if I invested my savings into this, I could probably cut that curve down and it did work.

(Colleen at 00:09:37) Wow. Nice. What were you basing that bet on? Because it's a pretty big bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:44) On the bet that I'll never give up. I decided that I was willing to die. I would be willing to continue to try to make this work until I died. And if I didn't make it work, I would just continue to try. And I would be an 80-year-old person or 90-year-old person who passed away trying to make a successful, you know, podcast.

(Colleen at 00:10:04) I will be very honest, Joel. That is a level of commitment that I do not personally have to Build Better Tech. But clearly, you've been able to do incredible things with this. Okay. So it's about making a podcast, but the podcast is not the thing. The podcast is the thing that gets you to the thing. So what's the thing behind that that you're really trying to accomplish?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) Security through high-level relationships.

(Colleen at 00:10:34) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:35) Yep. That's what the start of it was. The start of it was, I need a vehicle to get me to know great people, because I kept watching people on Crunchbase. They track acquisitions and things like that. And it was always like the cousin of this venture capital person or this private equity. It was all relationships. And there were engineers that were good at tech, but I could look up their code on GitHub and I'm like, I'm a better engineer than this. But yet maybe I'm not because they just sold their company for $50 million. So I realized that the common thread between these people that I saw as having more success than me was they had a large number of relationships and were social. And at the time, I had made my money simply by having like four or five really close relationships with some people that just gave me a bunch of business.

(Colleen at 00:11:27) Were you your own boss before you started this, or what were you doing when you started to think about doing this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Yeah. I've had two jobs that weren't, I had two jobs. I've worked two places at companies I didn't own. The first one was like Outback Steakhouse for one shift as a busboy.

(Colleen at 00:11:50) Like literally one shift and then you, you know, turn in your dishtowel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:55) They give you a free dessert. That's what you get. They don't even put you into payroll or anything. They say, you come try it out. You work one shift, you get a free dessert and that's it. And I was like, it ruined blooming onions for me. So I was like, I'm done with this. And I did that because while I was making money online at the time, my parents wanted me to go out in the world and not just be in my room, which I respect that. But and then at Target, I think I held the job for three weeks before I accidentally said something inappropriate and the person, the manager was standing behind me. And I don't, I mean, I didn't really think it was inappropriate, but I learned, I've learned to better describe people.

(Colleen at 00:12:39) I'm sure you were young. You were young and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) Yeah. I was 14, probably 14, 15.

(Colleen at 00:12:44) Oh my gosh. Okay. So we're going way back. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:47) Yeah. It was my mom dropping me off, so I wasn't even driving at the time.

(Colleen at 00:12:51) Well, I don't know. Kids these days. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Kids these days. So I don't even know how we got on this, but I guess it was talking about jobs and the security of relationships, high-level relationships. That was just me. My thought was, if I can surround myself with really great people and I could build relationships with them, because those five people that I mentioned that gave me all my business in engineering, they really respected me for my technology. And I got along and I had really strong relationships with these people. And I was like, I need more genuinely strong relationships with people. And so this would act as sort of lead gen for that. And it's been pretty cool because over the 400 episodes, you know, there's a handful of people that I've become, like, you know, good personal friends with and have gone out and visited, hung out with, you know, spent time with. So—

(Colleen at 00:13:44) Yeah. Well, I hope to be counted among that list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Colleen at 00:13:50) How do you sustain those relationships? I mean, you know, going on somebody's podcast can be a little transactional. You know? So what are you, what are some of your moves or kind of follow-up for after someone's on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:05) Yeah. So I just kind of go with the interviews because we do a lot of them. And then sometimes as we're talking, we just have things in common, and we connect and it's really good. And then, I'll think of something maybe later that week. I don't try to do it. I would say I can honestly say that I don't try to do it, but sometimes it happens. And sometimes what I'll do is when I will be flying out to a place or visiting a town, I just pull up my spreadsheet of all the people I've spoken to and where they live and I sort. And then, for example, I was in Austin, Texas earlier this year, and I had this guy on from Firefly. He owns like a rocket ship company, and they're pretty cool. So when I was out there in Austin, I reached out to him and went and got to visit like the rocket ship factory and take a picture in front of the engines and stuff like that. It was pretty cool. He was the one that inspired the whole, we did a mini-series, two or three episodes on this concept of faith in the workplace. Because at the end of his episode, I was talking with him, because he's a founder and his company, when you try to start a company, it's constantly going out of business. That's just the nature of it. Right? And I was asking him why he continued. And he had a lot of adversity and couple failures along the way. And I was like, why'd you continue? And he's like, he started talking about a little bit about his faith and about God a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:37) And I was pretty taken aback because I had this realization that I never had talked about God or anything on the podcast before. And so then I started having all these questions. And so I started asking around to people, like, how do you talk about faith at work? And that spawned this faith in the workplace. So we had a CTO on, Brad Sosa, who I've become friends with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:03) He's like a pastor and a CTO out in California. And so I had him on to get his perspective. I got perspective of my pastor. So I had him on the show and asked him a bunch of questions. And that was pretty cool because I just kind of put it all out there.

(Colleen at 00:16:19) Yeah. I listened. That was the episode that I, when I saw and listened to it, I was like, I need to get in touch with this guy because he's just doing awesome stuff. So I listened. That was a really good episode. I'm a believer as well, and I'm always interested in other people's experience with how that identity interacts with their professional life and certainly how to talk about it in ways that are comfortable and appropriate. You know, any insight that I can get on that is always very welcome.

(Colleen at 00:16:54) So I love that episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:56) Yeah. My whole takeaway from that, like, couple months of my life was that sometimes opportunities present themselves and go with it. And you have to develop your own internal compass for when the right moment is. And the only way you can do that is by trial and failure. So it's not an easy thing.

(Colleen at 00:17:21) Yeah. Well, and this might be, you know, I think there might be some listeners that will not be able to identify this, but your hope is that you're spirit-led as well then, and it's not just you that can understand those moments and exactly what to say, but you can really trust that you'll be led. And one thing that I really am personally passionate about is scripture. You know, somebody told me one time that scripture memorized, scripture is the vocabulary that the Holy Spirit uses. And I thought that was, it's so true because, you know, God speaks to me through passages that I have really spent a lot of time with and committed to memory all the time.

(Colleen at 00:18:10) And I have them when I need them a lot of the time. And other times, you know, I feel lost and alone and scared, but it has been so true that that scripture that's in my brain is actively used.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:26) Yeah. Yeah. I was taking some notes on how to start a podcast and we didn't get very far. Bullet point one, I think you nailed it. Decide what you want out of it, what your why is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40) What's another thing you were thinking about when starting a podcast?

(Colleen at 00:18:44) My personal decision—and by personal decisions, I mean my husband who's a musician and very, as just a musician, he has a very finely attuned, educated ear on sound—he really encouraged me to spend a little bit more on the gear, just get the sound quality right, get the production value right, because that can go a long way towards legitimacy kind of out of the gate. I think there's not a single person listening to this that hasn't turned on a podcast that you checked that you wanted to check out for the first time, and something about the quality just turned you off immediately, and you couldn't make it. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:27) Oh, you can see it in our stats when the guests have nice mics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:31) And the audio. Oh, yeah. You can definitely see the episodes when people join with AirPods versus when people join with Shure microphones, or whatever microphone you have is really nice. It's coming across really nice. Yeah. So it's actually pretty odd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:48) She's got a microphone, it's like a headset on and it's got the earmuffs, I guess is what we'll call them, and the microphone. But I have seen a number of those do exceedingly well, very, very close to the SM7B type deal that I have. And so when I travel and I'm not at the studio, I have a pair of those types of things because I can take it really easy. I don't need the stand and the Focusrite and the Cloudlifter and all of that. So gear is important, thinking about what you want out of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:21) Obviously starting is super important. The other things that we have found, if we're giving away our secrets, posting consistently, like the same time, same day of the week was the biggest factor in our increase of listeners, like when we first started out. So the first couple months we were just posting whenever, and then we heard from another podcaster how important it is to post at the exact same time every week, whatever cadence or frequency that you do. And then you can also do seasonal and batch record and dump them all at once. That also works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) You see that in the Netflix type deal. But that had a very large impact to our listenership right out of the gate.

(Colleen at 00:21:06) Mhmm. That's really good advice for me because I have been going with a, I'm kind of like, probably a bad hybrid of both of those in that I did the first season as a batch. And then since then, I've gotten just a couple of cool, really great opportunities, so I just didn't want to wait on the, Luke Julia, the founder of, or one of the two co-creators of Siri. I couldn't, like, of course, like, I'm not going to wait to share that because it was just a fantastic interview and kind of got the pump primed a little bit for me to get back in the recording mindset. And then also, you know, Brendan Idelson, CTO at Zoom, that went out, you know, kind of as soon as I could get it out.

(Colleen at 00:21:51) I'm planning on doing, like, a batch of season two. I kept the interview list really tight. Like, I wanted to feature C-level leadership at extremely well-known household name companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:10) Yeah. You want Friday night party mix. Right? This is the best songs.

(Colleen at 00:22:14) I mean, kind of. Yeah. And I'd be interested to know what you, so my hope is, like, I want to do that season, you know, as another batch in Q1 of next year, and then I'd love to feature just smaller companies. Because you know what? And this is not to, like, when you're the C-level leadership at a Fortune 500 company, you've been media trained.

(Colleen at 00:22:41) You know you have to stay away from areas that are at all controversial. You just need to stay really on message. And that's great. You know, that's great content. And, obviously, the folks that I have been able to connect with, thankfully, just are really insightful people and fun and have a lot of energy and insight that they're bringing to the conversation, but they have some constraints.

(Colleen at 00:23:04) And so I'd be interested to hear your perspective on guests from different profiles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:10) We're the Amazon store. So, like, we got everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) We found out, to your point, if you focus on a specific level of company, regardless of what it is, whether it's startup scale, growth, enterprise, you will get the same advice because they're experiencing the same things at each stage. So we actually started being intentional in our calendar about booking slots for early stage companies, startups, growth stage companies and enterprise. And we actually have a pie chart. Yeah, we have a pie chart actually of the episode mix that our team follows. And obviously things change too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:53) So for the first six, eight months of the podcast, I was recording five episodes. Sometimes two to three episodes a day and I'd go home and my wife would be like, you got to stop this because you can't even talk. Because I kept losing my voice. And so I backed it down to like three a week, which we found to be sustainable. And then from there, we had to figure out how to grow it, how to make money from it, how to keep it going because it's something that we really loved and that we wanted to keep, you know, keep making happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:31) And so then we sort of learned, like, the business side of things.

(Colleen at 00:24:36) So how do you, I mean, like, I was going to ask, how do you stay inspired and kind of allow yourself to be refreshed and come into the recordings that you do just with the energy that you need to?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) Yeah. So I'm pretty transparent. I found that that tends to be my favorite strategy. So humans go up and down. So it's a natural thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) For myself, what I do is I get to talk to these great people about it. And so people that listen to all the episodes have a really good idea of what's going on in my personal life. I did a call yesterday and this guy is like, oh man, how's Asheville? Oh, that's such a cool fifth wheel that you have. Oh, this. And he just knew my entire history.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:18) And I was like, this is awesome. But it's cool. So I'd be super open and I talk to people when I'm not feeling it. And I ask them, what do they do? How do they stay excited?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) I look for people coming up in recent episodes, in future episodes, I'll say, okay, I need to talk about this topic. Who do I have coming up this week that I can talk about this with? And then I'll find somebody that I trust based off of their credentials. Like maybe this person, I specifically remember one time when I started to get depressed. It was sometime in the summer, like the second or third year, but I started to get depressed because I had just big name after big name, after big name, after big name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:03) And then it just became this thing where, like, law of diminishing returns, where I wouldn't get excited. And I was sad at the fact that I wasn't excited getting to talk to this awesome person. And so I talked to a couple of them and I found out that people who stay at their job for a long time develop a skill to keep things fresh. And that's one of the differences I've noticed between people who jump around a lot and people who stay at a job for a while. Some people, they run their careers—and there's nothing wrong with it by the way—run their careers where they say, okay, I'm going to go in, I'm going to make a meaningful contribution to this organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42) It's going to take me two, three, four years. And then I'm going to go find something else that's new and interesting to keep me excited. That's completely fine, totally viable strategy. Happens, I would say, more often than not. That's like the 80%. The 20% is when the people start there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:57) Like, the CIO of T-Mobile, Cody Sanford, he's retired now, but he started as, I think, like an intern or entry-level person. And he was at T-Mobile for like 20-plus years. And then he became the CIO. And I was asking him and some other people, you know, like, how do you do that? Why do you stay?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) And they just have this skill of constantly making it new and interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:21) So the first time I ever got depressed or whatever about this, going through this podcasting, I talked to people, I learned that, and then I just keep finding new ways to make it interesting. It's like I built a new studio. I was super excited about that. I pulled up a list of things that I wanted to talk about because when we first started, it was me coming home every night after doing those four or five episodes or three episodes a day, whatever it was. And I would eat dinner, attempt to have a conversation with my wife.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) And then I'd sit down and I'd email 125 CTOs asking them to come on the show. Because, like, nobody knew anything about the show or it was super early. And so that's just what I did for like six or eight months. And I think it's important that I share this because I want to give an expectation of the level of work on what it took for me to get started so people can go into this. And I guess they should expect it would be twice as hard as it was for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) And because I did have money invested to help me and I had a producer from day one, which was really useful. So yeah, it's definitely a lot of work to start a podcast, but you can keep it really simple and get going and then see if you like it or not. And I'd say either way, keep doing it. Because I'm, like, the do it forever until you die type person.

(Colleen at 00:28:45) Yeah. I mean, I hope it's useful for your audience to hear two different perspectives because I am kind of opposite end of the spectrum in that this was something that I wanted to do because I thought it would be cool. I loved my job. I'm coming up on six years with my company. I started as the company's only salesperson and joined the executive team, stepped into a CRO role at the beginning of 2021.

(Colleen at 00:29:11) And every year has been like working at a different company. We're solving different challenges. I'm solving different challenges, moving from being an individual contributor to being on the executive team to being a manager. And it is just, I keep waiting to get bored, but things are, and thankfully, the problems that we're working on as a company that I get to be very involved in, they're different problems.

(Colleen at 00:29:37) Like, you're always going to have problems in your business. You just want to try and upgrade your problems as you go and keep having more desirable problems. Like, how are we going to supply all this demand that we're seeing, and things like that. But in terms of how the podcast fits in, it's something that I want to be a part of my life and my career and kind of my portfolio, but I want it to be very much on my terms. And if it stops serving me, then I'm totally okay with letting it go.

(Colleen at 00:30:14) But, and having that body of work that, you know, lives on. And but, heck, it's fun. I'm going to keep doing it until it gets, you know, until I'm tired of doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:26) What does the company do?

(Colleen at 00:30:28) Acklen Avenue offers agile teams as a service. We also do staff augmentation, but, yeah, we've got a great model for custom software development that works really well for ambitious companies that are trying to accelerate software delivery.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) I love it.

(Colleen at 00:30:44) Yeah. It's been fun. It's been a, it really, it's a great, the founders have a really clear mission to just create a great place for people to work, and it has been that. It has really been that. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:56) That's exciting.

(Colleen at 00:30:57) Just glad to be part of that team as well. And they are very, you know, it's very compatible. It was that job, you know, making the connections that I got to make through Acklen Avenue that set me up for success in starting my podcast. So they're very, very much connected, although they're totally separate, you know, entities. Build Better Tech is mine and mine alone.

(Colleen at 00:31:21) And I don't, you know, spend a lot of time talking about Acklen Avenue on Build Better Tech.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:26) You mentioned something when you were talking. So originally when we started the podcast, we were doing it live, but then moments like that, we just edited out. Moments like that, people would share all sorts of things that they shouldn't share, whether it's SEC violations. And I get it too because they're in their office where they feel comfortable because I'm doing these remote. It's not like they're on a set with lights in their face. And so they're in their office where they feel comfortable and they just 10 minutes ago came out of this boardroom meeting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:58) And so sometimes they would share stuff and then the PR people would freak out and they're like, take it down. And we're like, it's a live stream.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:06) Whoever was watching live already saw it, but we would have to take down the live stream. And so then we learned pretty early on after it happened a handful of times at different levels of intensity that we couldn't live stream the original interview. But most people don't know this, you can, like, record the interview, edit it, and then live stream the recording. So just because it says live on Facebook does not mean it's live.

(Colleen at 00:32:29) Okay. So pro tip y'all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Yeah. Pro tip.

(Colleen at 00:32:33) Beware of your favorite social media influencer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:37) Yeah, because I mean they can't tell. To them, it's a video incoming video stream.

(Colleen at 00:32:41) Yeah, that's good. You know, it's interesting because this season, as I have approached higher profile guests, there's a whole different process there and a whole you have to interact with a whole set of people in order to go through questions and, you know, make sure that there are no sensitive areas that you bring up or discuss. And by the way, you're not gonna know what the areas are, but you'll think like this is a very harmless question and for some reason it will not be something that they want to talk about. So that's kind of a drag that you do have to put, you know, have those kind of walled off areas. But if you have those conversations, then it ultimately makes your guests feel more comfortable because then they can talk freely without worrying that they're gonna say something and not be able to walk it back. So there's freedom in the constraints of it, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:39) Absolutely. All right, so let's get back to this list.

(Colleen at 00:33:43) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:43) How to start a podcast. Think of what you want out of it. Spend a bit on the gear. Get guests. We talked a little bit about how I got guests. How did you get your first guest?

(Colleen at 00:33:54) I called him on the phone and asked if he wanted to be on my podcast. My first recording was with the CEO of Lonely Planet at the time, Luis Cabrera. And he happened to be a Nashville guy. Lonely Planet was based out of Nashville at the time. I'm not sure whether they've been acquired since then, so I'm not sure where their headquarters technically is. But yeah, I was lucky enough to—I knew some folks at Lonely Planet, and so I was tangentially, you know, I had a couple, I knew a couple of folks that he knew. But, you know, I have a background in sales, and so the idea of picking up the phone and calling someone is not nobody's gonna, like, that's gonna be their favorite thing to do, but that's relatively comfortable territory for me. So that was my first guest. And, you know, it was a good one. It's a great, you know, it's not a bad episode. I went back and listened to it. I expected to be horrified at the sound of my voice and all those things. But actually, you know, he made it. He was just a great guest with lots of things to say. So that was my move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:04) Yeah. I try not to listen to my episodes. I mean, sometimes I have to because people will, like, the production team will talk about something and I'll go listen to a couple of the episodes. But I try as hard as I can not to, but I do sometimes. So back to this list, here we go. We're making this list. We're bringing value to the audience. All right, so how to start a podcast: think what you want out of it. I added something to the list. Arguably, the most important thing is figure out who the audience is and how this brings them value. If your goal is to grow an audience, that's what you would definitely have to do. So I did that through research, through my own experience, through talking to people. And so a lot of people will say, oh, I don't know what the topics are I'm going to discuss on my podcast. And it's like, well, it's really, really easy. Figure out who the audience is and find out what they want to hear about and what they care about. Use the internet, Reddit, Google search, common questions, or talk to them. Ideally, you're in the industry or you're nearby it to the point where you can reach out to these people and just ask them what we should be talking about. And then of course, asking the guest, who is the subject matter expert, what areas are really going fast or moving fast in the industry you're in, or what's really exciting about the industry currently? And then allowing those, asking them what their problems were. I'd say learning to ask these people the mistakes that they've made and what their problems were and things of that nature. The best leaders can just answer them really easily and clearly. And so I was like, yeah, they're not scared of them at all.

(Colleen at 00:36:44) Yeah. My favorite moments on my own podcast are when someone is willing to tell a story and really dish on, most likely they'll dish on themselves and tell a story about the time when they learned something. That's much more helpful and much more interesting than people talking in platitudes or in abstract terms. That actually, I would say that that was one of my founding principles in why I wanted to start a podcast, was because a lot of podcasts that I heard with people that I thought were very interesting, I just never felt like the interviewer quite asked the question that I wanted to hear the answer to with the degree of specificity that I wanted to hear it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) The media trained. You know?

(Colleen at 00:37:37) Yeah, that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:39) I hate that. So we've learned a lot. We've gotten really, really good in our process and that's credit to the production team who's awesome. We've gotten really good about the expectation for the guest and that if it gets media trained, we cut it out. And if they get a ten-minute episode, they get a ten-minute episode.

(Colleen at 00:38:02) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:03) We don't do that. We set it up so well where it's not like authoritarian us telling them. They're so good, the production team, about meeting with the person, meeting with their PR team before the call, before the episode. Did you do a prep episode with Jesse? Yes. And he set the expectation: this is the conversation. It's not like, yep. And so we reinforced that continuously throughout the process and then, you know, we hope for the best. So we got a lot of it at the beginning when we started to first get big, and then we figured out how to structure our process in a way that yields better results.

(Colleen at 00:38:44) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:45) Yeah.

(Colleen at 00:38:45) Man, I'm just getting, you know, kind of to the tip of the iceberg on that. So even just hearing you say that, A, is very validating, and B, I think will help me have discipline, frankly, about how to run the process and how to do the editing such that it actually ends up being helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:04) Yeah. I'll tell you a secret. Here's a secret to this casual conversation thing. The first thing is I'm only interested in talking to people. I'm not interested in interviewing them per se, like a classic interview. And what I found was, and I didn't find this out for like after two years till we started charging money and doing sponsorships, but there is a whole ecosystem out there. People pay thousands of dollars at these conferences to get interviewed. And it's like a really dry, it's scripted. Literally, we've had people send us scripts and I'm just like, I vent to my production team and then we professionally respond. I'm like, what is this? So there's a whole market out there, Colleen, that people will pay for these super canned pre-scripted interviews. And I don't know who's watching them. I have no idea who's watching them, but they get recorded and sent somewhere, maybe on some webpage somewhere. So when we started to get people saying, and I mean this in a humble way, we started getting people saying at the end of the episodes, oh my gosh, that was so cool. I've never done anything like that. This was so interesting. And I'm like, you're a well-known leader. How have you never done anything like this? Because my introduction to interviewing was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast and I was like, oh, he just talks to him. That's easy. And yeah, there's all this super formal interviews out there and that's typically what they're doing. And so that's how I learned about it, because I was like, you guys, are you just being nice? And they're like, no, this is like, it wasn't static. It wasn't dry. It wasn't scripted. I was like, what are you talking about? And then I learned about that whole industry. And that's when we figured out that we could charge money.

(Colleen at 00:40:54) Okay. Got it. Well, that's cool. Yeah, I think I can improve upon that experience, hopefully. I mean, the last interview that I did was with someone who we had been through a process, but it still was a really fun interview. And actually, you know, to all the listeners out there, I'm not gonna give you content that's not genuinely interesting. So go ahead and subscribe. Even if it's somebody relatively high profile, it'll still be good. I promise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:27) All right. Back to this list. Can we get back? Okay, can I do it again? I'm just gonna keep reading over and over until our team can edit it up so it's not annoying. All right. You think of what you want out of it, why you're doing it to start a podcast. You figure out who the audience is and how you're going to bring them value, right? You get some decent gear. You don't have to go over the top with $100 or $500 microphones and lights and stuff. You can do this all for less than $100. Get some gear that's slightly better than whatever default gear is on your devices. Get your first guest by reaching out to people. For me, it was taking, I think, 125 and I'd get one or two a week early on. So 125 people a night. And then, so that's 125 times five, and then I'd get one or two from that. So then get that person booked, typically set an expectation with them about what the interview is going to be like, ask them what topics that they're interested or excited about, because your guest will always do best with whatever they're excited about and you don't get to control what they're excited about.

(Colleen at 00:42:33) Yeah. I will say on that, they are looking to you for something of a starting place in terms of like, what do you want out of me? Because while we think it's very obvious what, you know, these people would be able to provide expertise in, I do think it's helpful, and it also will help you get the gig by saying, I want to hear from you personally because of these reasons.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) Absolutely. Yeah. So we go with, we come to the prep meeting or to the conversation, however it's happening, with a specific set of topics and an interview flow. Like we have these topics we want to discuss in about this order and yes or no, yay or nay. And then in that prep meeting, we're asking them, like, what else are you excited about? You're exactly right. You definitely don't want to say, hey, will you do an interview with me, Sally or John? And they'll say yes. And they'd be like, all right, what do you want to talk about? What do you think it should be about?

(Colleen at 00:43:34) Yeah. That's a quick way to fail.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:37) Yeah.

(Colleen at 00:43:40) So somewhere in the middle maybe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:42) Somewhere in the middle. Let's see. So I said come to them with a prep sheet. So you get your first guest, you have some sort of prep sheet, some idea of what you want to talk about, some general questions. Ask them what they're excited about, current events or whatnot, if there's anything. Then you just get on that call, you hit record and you figure it out. You fly, you take the leap. You're never going to get to a point in this list where it'll always end and you have to take the leap.

(Colleen at 00:44:10) Yeah. Do you think that, you know, if I am starting a podcast in tech, I've got something within the current landscape of podcasts available, how specific do you need to be about what your podcast is about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:30) Okay. So for me, I was very specific to the audience. So I was like, all right, I want to talk about these topics. These people know about these topics. I'm going to go in there and talk to them. I'd say that you can, I think you can make it work any way, but I'm almost certain that it's easier to start in a well-defined niche, or niche—I don't know how people say it, but it's one of those. And start in somewhere that's really clear and well-defined because then you can own it. So my goal from a listener perspective was to completely own the CTO audience in the sense that we're a place that everybody knows that they can come get value in, in the community. And so once everybody, you know, knew about it, that was the goal is for everybody to know about it and to bring them as much value as possible.

(Colleen at 00:45:25) Yeah. I think it's hard, probably harder now than it was. Do you think, like, it feels like maybe podcasts have gone the way of blogs a little bit that it's easy to—does that metaphor work for you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:41) I think I agree that is definitely popular consensus and whatnot. I have a counterargument to it, and it would be that good people, interesting people with their own thoughts are super hard to come by. And it doesn't matter what medium they're using, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, radio, Disney TV episode, podcasting. Doesn't matter the medium in which they're communicating with other humans. It really is about their personality, their ideas, what they're discussing and what they're talking about.

(Colleen at 00:46:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:20) I think you can still learn there. And their sound quality, for sure. I learned about sound quality. So my brother-in-law is a music producer. He did a bunch of the Disney-type kids. He's done a lot of different people. Enough to have a Wikipedia entry, right? And I was hanging out with him at his studio once and he's like, all right, come on, let's go drive test this. I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, yo, after we do a mix, we bounce a mix. And I'm like, he's using all words I didn't know. He's like, we bounce out this mix. And then he goes, then we go and we listen to it in the car as we drive with the windows down or something. And I was like, but we're in this massive studio with infinitely priced equipment and the highest—he goes, that's exactly it. He goes, but nobody's listening to it like this. He goes, only we are listening to it like this because everyone else is listening to it in their car. We have to go do the car test. And I said, oh, so that's what I did with my podcast. And it definitely drove my producer nuts because we were learning audio. He wasn't experienced as a producer, which was great because it was cost effective for me. But he definitely learned and grew a whole lot over the course of all of this. But I would go get in the car. I would drive. I'd be like, this is garbage. And he's like, it's really great. And I was like, well, we're listening on studio equipment here. And so that's one of the things I really cared about from the beginning was I would say as much as I said earlier that I didn't listen to the podcast, at the beginning, I listened constantly. I listened every day on the way into the studio until we got it right, until we got the intro right, until we got the template and the sound quality and everything to where I was happy.

(Colleen at 00:47:53) Got it. Yeah. Yeah, it makes a difference. It's funny.

(Colleen at 00:47:57) My husband said the same thing. Like, you've gotta listen to it in a variety of settings. Ideally, the least, you know, the most offensive setting is the one that you need to optimize for. So yeah, he said the same thing. And I hope I'm proud of what we've done.

(Colleen at 00:48:14) I think it sounds good. I have a producer as well who does very good work, so shout out to Eric.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:20) Yeah. I like that you brought that up too, because I was going to ask you if you do everything yourself. When I first started, I hired this girl. Her name is Jenny. She was helping a bunch of people with podcasts, so it was like a freelance type deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:36) And so she sort of showed me the ropes and everything, like how to create an intro and we worked together. And then we progressed from there. But there is an entire underground, or not, it's not underground anymore, but there's an entire crew of people like on Upwork or just Googling around that can produce a podcast, like super low cost to start. And so if you didn't want to sit there and edit out the umms or whatnot, you can get a podcast done for fairly cheap.

(Colleen at 00:49:08) Yeah. I was lucky enough to run across the guy, Eric Wilson, that I work with in Nashville through a mutual friend whose podcast sounded fantastic.

(Colleen at 00:49:20) He's been a really good partner. He gives me great feedback and makes, you know, minor editorial decisions. We try to keep it pretty of one piece, but, as well, I know you guys do as well. But he's been a great partner, so I'm lucky.

(Colleen at 00:49:39) He's not. Alright. I mean, I just opted not to try to learn that myself. You know, I just have enough. But yeah, I wanna be good at the things that I'm gonna be good at, and that was not something that I cared to learn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) Yes. I was taking the approach that I'll find the guest, research the guest, invite people, write questions, do the interview, be interested in them and understand what value they could bring the audience. And then for the technical stuff, I was like, I need someone else. It's also a lot better to do it with somebody else because then you get that perspective that you just can't get by being a solo person.

(Colleen at 00:50:19) Yeah. Well, you seem to have a really great team. I've gotten to meet a couple of your folks and they seem pretty top notch. So good job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:27) Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Thank you. My plan did not go as expected.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:34) I thought what would happen is that the podcast, I would get to meet some relationships and that would open up doors to go maybe work at these other companies or work on projects with them. But then when we got backed up and people started paying for it, I realized, okay, well, we can make money with the podcast. Because I said at the beginning, if you go back to the first episodes, it said, I'll never put ads in the podcast. And we won't put ads in the podcast. And the reason why is because the first couple weeks I was putting together the podcast and thinking of it as an idea and shopping it around to people, everybody at the time said there's too many podcasts, and this was four years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:11) So they're always going to say that. They're always going to say it. And so I would ask people that listen to podcasts what their favorite podcast was. And I'd asked like 20 people and I heard at least five of them say the same thing. And they didn't know each other either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:27) They said, oh, this was my favorite podcast. And then they put ads on it and I stopped listening. I was like, oh, okay. So I decided really early on that we wouldn't put ads on the podcast. And so people could come on, we could talk about their product or what they're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:42) We can talk about, because every product is solving a problem in the industry. So there's always an interesting conversation around it. So that's what we did. And it worked out.

(Colleen at 00:51:53) And you still have not done ads.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:55) We still have not done ads. Does Acklen Avenue have a podcast?

(Colleen at 00:51:58) We don't yet. We are. It's kinda, it's on our marketing roadmap for 2022. I think we've got some. I think what we'll do, it's very like, the best podcast that Acklen Avenue could make would be about just great teams and having fun while you're doing it. So I'm kind of hatching an idea about just getting, you know, smart people that know software development really well and giving them opportunities just to make each other better and have some fun. And so, obviously, it's still very unformed as a concept, but we'll get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:41) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.

(Colleen at 00:53:11) The Build Better Tech podcast features upbeat interviews with leaders at influential brands leveraging world-class technology as business strategy. In this clip, Philip Ben, former VP at Walmart eCommerce and CEO at Imperfect Foods, discusses how to lead in promoting innovation and risk-taking within an organization, large or small.

(Philip Ben at 00:53:33) The biggest thing is to be transparent and authentic about it. I mean, if you really wanna do this, you have to be able to embrace and tolerate failure. And that's sometimes difficult because a lot of these companies have sort of relatively rigid performance management systems where you commit to a goal and if you don't meet the goal, you don't get your bonus or, you know, you don't get any brownie points certainly for not meeting your goals. Whereas if you truly believe in an agile approach, which is kind of more experiment-driven, many experiments will fail, and that's good.

(Colleen at 00:54:08) Most of them will.

(Philip Ben at 00:54:09) Exactly. And you have to celebrate that, and you have to go from the sort of the hurtful feeling of failure to the great feeling of learning. Right? So that pivot is an important one. And when I say you have to be authentic is you have to really mean it.

(Philip Ben at 00:54:26) Right? It's not enough to just say it, and then when the first experiment flops, your body language shows that you're upset, right, as a leader. Those things are cues that everybody will pick up. So you actually have to embrace that failure and say, you know what? I'm so glad we did it.

(Philip Ben at 00:54:43) Now we know that this outcome, you know, is not great. Therefore, we're gonna do another experiment and sort of avoid this in the future. Right?

(Colleen at 00:54:51) So good that we learned that now.

(Philip Ben at 00:54:52) Exactly. Because if you learn it soon, you learn it early, you avoid making that mistake in the future at scale. So I think by truly believing it and kind of really role modeling that, you have to walk the talk. That's been my biggest learning in sort of these agile transformations.

(Colleen at 00:55:11) Can you tell me about a couple of times that are kind of like war stories for you that really were, you know, dark night of the soul moments, or, and also, you know, on the flip side, world victories where you did exactly what you meant to do and it was great?

(Philip Ben at 00:55:27) Yeah. For sure. I mean, one of sort of my proudest moments, and I have to give credit to my boss in Mexico, a guy called Guy Laredo, who's an amazing leader, was the creation of what we call the digital factory for the business. A traditional retailer doesn't really have a digital factory. You know, this is something that we created.

(Philip Ben at 00:55:51) It was a first in Mexico, and it's probably a first, you know, among the major retailers around the world. We had no idea how big this factory needed to be, how much it would cost, you know, how much failure we would have to tolerate within this factory.

(Colleen at 00:56:06) What's the founding vision for a digital factory?

(Philip Ben at 00:56:09) Yeah. So the founding vision for the factory was to turn a company that was kind of a very traditional waterfall-type environment where things got built into plans and then executed sort of across many months to a very agile, sort of very customer-attuned, iterative innovation company. And that's kinda not at the heart of a retailer. So we wanted to create a small group of people that would learn the method and would really learn how to operate in an agile environment. And then the plan was to move those people from the digital factory to bigger businesses so that they could transform the way that those businesses operated.

(Philip Ben at 00:56:49) And we made a bunch of sort of early rookie mistakes. Like, for example, we completely underestimated the challenges of finding great agile coaches and training agile coaches. There aren't too many of those around, and it's a very different profile from a project manager. These are people who really have to have kinda one foot in deep technology development or product development and the other foot in leadership and people and coaching and being teachers. So we kinda, it took us a lot longer to find those people, and therefore it took us a lot longer to get the factory started.

(Philip Ben at 00:57:25) Another learning was the amount of investment that we had to put in. Initially, we thought, oh, yeah, we could pull this off with, you know, a smaller budget just to get this thing started. But then we realized that our teams were being artificially constrained by resources. They weren't being constrained by the ability to get things done, but they just couldn't hire fast enough or they couldn't invest in some of these tests fast enough. So we had to become comfortable with an approach where we gave them a bigger budget, and we allowed them a lot of, you know, autonomy to spend against that budget.

(Philip Ben at 00:58:00) And then the third thing that happened, which I think was very interesting, again, a learning, is we kind of immediately assumed that people would be seconded into these teams and would start making autonomous decisions because we wanted to have smaller, autonomous, agile teams. But what ended up happening is there was a hierarchy behind them. Right? So the people that we put in those rooms reported into a vice president here or a director over there, and they felt that they couldn't commit to anything without getting formal sign-up from their bosses. So what we had to do is we had to basically tell the teams, you know what?

(Philip Ben at 00:58:34) From now on and for the duration of this agile sprint or this entire project, the squad, as we call them, you will report to the CEO of the company effectively. Right? So we will create a direct line between the product team or this agile squad and the CEO of the company. And that helped us kind of really unlock the potential of these teams so that they wouldn't be slowed down by individual decision-making that happens in traditional organizational silos.

(Colleen at 00:59:03) How did you? That seems like it would make a lot of people very, very...

(Philip Ben at 00:59:08) ...our own feed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No.

(Philip Ben at 00:59:10) But Guy and the leadership team at Walmart in Mexico has been incredibly consistent and supportive of that approach, and they are changing culture as we speak.

(Colleen at 00:59:20) Tune in to the full episode out on all major platforms, and check out other episodes featuring leaders at Zoom, Vitamin Shoppe, Lonely Planet, and more.