This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Thank you for tuning in today and happy Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to our American audience. If you were listening outside the States, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, it's one of the few holidays that I actually enjoy sometimes with the holidays. I'm like, let's just get this over with, get back to real life.
But Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful, just like every day is, but you know, it's a special day to be grateful. So happy Thanksgiving. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now, a weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Now last week, we heard from the owner of a business that sells pyrographic drumsticks and other personalized items. We called it handcrafted drumsticks ignite into profits.
She marches to the beat of her own drummer, and she also relied on her side hustle turned full-time business when she became unemployed. Happily so, I should add. It's all worked out very well. Now today in our latest feature, we'll hear from John Corcoran. When he first featured John on episode 894, former White House aide teaches people to make friends.
And John describes himself as a recovering attorney. He operates a service helping businesses with podcasts. This has now grown into a seven-figure operation that he continues to improve. So well done, John. Let's hear his update, and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up.
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I'm John Corcoran. I'm in San Francisco. My company is Rise 25, and my episode was 894. My side hustle is we help B2B businesses to create podcasts and do content marketing. I got started doing a podcast 11 years ago.
I was practicing law at the time, and so it truly was a side hustle. In fact, I guess a hustle implies that it makes money, which it didn't to begin with. It took a little while to get some traction, but I started a podcast on the side. I loved doing it. I started getting clients and referrals from it, and so I've been doing it ever since, 11 years later.
And about three or four years ago, after having told everyone I met that they should start a podcast because it brings such great value to your life. You meet amazing people. It's personal and professional development. It's content marketing, all that kind of stuff. We finally decided that we were six years old.
We finally decided that we were sick of people saying they couldn't do it. And so we started lending out our team and helping people with the strategy. And this side thing that we started doing really became our primary thing. And now we've got a team of 40 people that are helping us to do it. We've got clients all over the globe, big companies like a Berkshire Hathaway company and law firms and consulting firms and all kinds of different stuff that we're helping to build better relationships by creating great podcast content.
We are very much a shoot first, aim later type of approach. That's my business partner, Jeremy Weiss, and I definitely take that approach. And so we had talked to so many people, having done a podcast for at least six or seven years at that point. Each of us separately done podcasts for six or seven years. So we just started very simply with one person.
We had a client who was interested in starting a podcast and we said, well, what if our team were to do it for you? We'll help you with the strategy. And we figured out, we agreed on a price and we very much figured it out along the way. So we just kind of hopped on Zoom calls with him, helped to kind of explain the different things he needed to do. In the meantime, maybe between meetings, we're figuring out what's the next thing we need to do.
How do we need to help him along the way? What are the ways in which he's challenged? And we literally just figured it out along the way. And that made me nervous as we were to start holding ourselves out to help others to do it themselves. But I realized that it's okay.
I didn't need to have all the answers because I was still delivering value to the client because I was helping them with the strategy, which is really what they needed help with. And then we had other team members who could help with some of the mechanics and some of the technical aspects. And then from one client, it went to two, to three, to four. And we started adding more and we refined the process. We continue to refine the process.
You're always refining the process. You're always trying to make it better. So, we definitely grow in the size of the team. We've grown the number of clients that we're working with. We've improved the quality, the caliber of the clients that we're working with and documented our process and made it a business that, I certainly wouldn't say it's something where I can go on a three month vacation and everything will be fine.
We're not quite at that point yet, but I do feel like we have, I say to people all the time, we're doing the unsexy things that you need to do in order to grow the business. So, a lot of times it's documenting processes and it's hiring additional people to back up the people that you already have just to ensure if someone has to go out sick or if they're unavailable for a little period of time that someone else can step in in order to perform that task. The other thing I'll say is look for really market shifts and see if you can ride an upswing. So, I was fortunate to start a podcast 11 years ago. The nature of podcasting is really, that one word is part of a larger shift in the entire media landscape.
So, if you go back 25 years ago, there were a handful of media companies, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, like that was it, right? And now any company can be a media company and every company needs to move into creating content because it's all about content marketing these days. Those are fundamental major shifts in the marketplace and it's a lot easier to just ride that wave if it's going in the right direction than to be an industry that's retracting or that is not growing. And so, I would encourage you to think about that, think about what industry are you in and is there gonna be a growth in the marketplace that you can take advantage of? There's a touching story my business partner interviewed.
He's interviewed a couple of people who have sadly passed away. He's been doing it for 11, 12 years now. And he got an email from a family member shortly after one of my business partners guests had passed away and they said, they'd just gotten done listening to the episode that Jeremy had recorded and was just so grateful to him for having taken the time to record that. And so, that's what's really meaningful for us is helping not just us doing it, but teaching others how to do this so that all the clients that we work with, they can do that as well. And so, they'll have that same type of experience where they're helping to preserve a legacy for their clients, for their referral partners, for their network.
And that's what's really rewarding and enjoyable for us. [Music]
Thanks to John for sharing his updates. I love this part about the unsexy things you need to do to grow the business. That's sometimes how it is. You have these things you do to actually invest in a foundation for your business so that you can spend your time doing other stuff.
So maybe in the long run, it's actually not unsexy. It's pretty cool. Check out his website at rise25.com, rise25.com. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories. And if you have a question or an update for us about your side hustle, just drop by sidehustleschool.com/questions or follow me on social media.
I always love to know what you're up to. I hope you will subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow. New episode every day. My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
