Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and I’m excited to talk to Steve Stewart today. And it turns out he edits and works on a lot of my favorite podcasts, some of the biggest podcasts in the personal finance, and really just the, the business space overall. So Steve, uh, welcome to the show.
Glad you can make it.
Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Doug. It’s an honor to be here. I, I didn’t expect, expect to ever be on your show, so this is really neat.
Doug: Very cool. So we’ve known each other for a couple years and we met at a, at a conference, and I often tell people like, there’s no better way to like build a connection.
We can meet each other online and chat and even schedule meetings, but there’s, there’s no way to replace like sitting next to each other and chatting, which we, we actually did at a, I think at least a couple conferences, but for the people that, that don’t know you, who are you? What do you do? And we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about your podcast editing.
I mean the whole service and the, I don’t know if it’s an agency but you have a lot of stuff in that area. So who are you, what, what’s your background?
Steve: I’m a guy who fell in love with personal finance in the mid two thousands, and it took over part of my life, I was still working a day job, but I started a financial coaching business and found that I needed to start blogging.
So I started blogging in two, 2007, but that went nowhere. But I found a also found a love for the audio medium of podcasting. I had been a, a mobile DJ for three decades, and so I knew the gear. I knew some of the tech. I just didn’t know about RSS feeds and how to get into Apple and all that fun stuff.
So I stumbled through some of that and started a show in 2010. Fell in love with the medium. Then I found out about a conference called FinCon. Started going to that a bunch of content creators just like myself. Were there. Started to encourage other people who are only writing blogs to do something more.
I was always saying, you know, get your face and your voice on your blog. ’cause it was all just text and, you know, logos and no, no personality, but it was all in the writing. And through that encouragement and getting to know people, by encouraging them, I eventually got asked to edit somebody’s pod or they wanted to start a podcast, and they’re like, we just wanna hit record when you do the rest.
I’m like, sure I know how to do it. Never imagined a million years that it would become a career within six months, and it did. In the middle of 2016, I had to drop everything I was doing. I had already left the day job. I had to give up my financial coaching business, which was just kind of stagnant. It wasn’t going anywhere.
So I guess it kind of shows you how good of a coach I was or a salesman I guess, is really the problem there, and have been editing podcasts ever since for people, mostly in the personal finance genre.
Doug: Interesting. And right now, do you have employees or do you do the editing yourself?
Steve: There’s three employees.
Me, myself and I, we’ve been the same three employees since the beginning, but you know, it’s an LLC type thing. But I do have contractors. These are people that I trained how to edit my way, which really helps with quality control ’cause it’s nothing worse than, you know. Oh, Jo, Jimmy, Joe, Bob, you know, he’s a friend of a friend.
He could edit too. Send him the product and it turns. It comes back and it’s not the same. So I’ve got five, four or five it, some go on seasonal breaks, they leave me and then they come back. But four or five steadily who help me out to keep the workflow going.
Doug: And how many shows are you editing?
Steve: Oof?
Uh, I, I usually say 20. It’s dropping right now. We’ve got a lot of seasonal breaks going on. I’ve got a couple shows that are changing. Uh, but about 20, it’s, it’s a. It’s a nice, steady workflow or workload, I guess you’d say.
Doug: That is, that’s a lot. That’s really cool. Yeah. Okay. And, and I’m, and you, you’ve been doing this full-time for about a decade now.
Steve: Full-time since 2016, so we’re getting close, getting close to a decade. I. Yeah. Okay,
Doug: cool. Who does that? Who that, it’s so great to be self-employed, but I guess when you were doing the financial coaching, like you were self-employed at that point too, right?
Steve: Well, that was the side hustle business. Okay. It was always, I was working a day job of until 2015 and the financial coaching thing was just the thing I did while I was on the road.
I did a lot of traveling for that day job and when I was. In a hotel room, what am I gonna do? You know, watch television or sit at the bar and drink. I mean, you’re by yourself most of the time that way. So I’m like, let’s be productive. Here’s this personal finance thing. I’ve got a passion for it. I can write blog posts.
And in 2010 I was like, I could record. I. Podcast episodes. And so it was more of a side hustle that I did at night when I was away and then, you know, tried to do when I was at home as well, but it wasn’t a full-time gig until 2015. And even then, it just didn’t really take off.
Doug: Well, you, you hit two of my vices at hotels, which is watching Food Network and drinking at the bar.
Sometimes they in the room. Tv. Yeah, I mean, I don’t have cable at home. So yeah, I get there. I just turn on Food Network and I could watch Guy fii like. I dunno, 24 hours a day, which is basically what it seems to be on the Food network these days, so. Oh yeah. Well you’re,
Steve: you’d be totally at home here. My wife watches it all the time too.
So 24 in 24, I think is the new show. Whatever the 24 hour cooking show is, it’s crazy. Oh
Doug: yeah.
Steve: Insane.
Doug: So I, I, there’s so many jumping off points, but I’m glad we lay, laid out the foundation of like, you’re doing about 20 shows, you have a few contractors I love, I did this with my business as well, where.
Without full-time employees, it kinda lowers the responsibility. ’cause it’s, I mean, it’s a big weight on your shoulders. Like you have to support yourself and your family. But then if you have full-time employees, you have to think about their. Livelihood and their families as well. So if there’s you know, an interruption in the pipeline of like new clients or there’s a drop off or whatever, whatever issues might happen that are external outside your control, like that’s a lot of stress.
If you’re thinking I have to create enough work or maybe like. Interrupt your cash flow to continue to pay them. So a lot of stress, and I like having a lean company where you could kind of scale up and scale down. No direct question there, but is that intentional? Were, is that part of the reason why you have a small, lean company?
Steve: Yes, absolutely. I don’t wanna get too big. I don’t want to become a big old agency with hundreds. I do have a friend who has over 150 podcasts at his company at its for, and he’s got like project managers. He even built his own CRM type of thing. It’s crazy. I guess I just am not driven to do that. I kinda like working for my friends.
We’ll say most of the people that have hired me, I’ve met at some point. They’re in that FinCon economy type of, of community, all the personal finance genres type things. But yeah, the contractors make it so convenient to take on new clients when I can or want to. And if then I’ve got clients that drop off, take these little breaks or something, then I’m not, nobody’s being harmed.
Of course, my contractors want steady work. They’d love to have more work if they can, but then they take vacations and then, you know, so it’s a. It’s an ebb and flow of the workload That happens all the time. It, but with having contractors instead of employees it does make it a lot easier to manage that workflow, although the cash flow still fluctuates.
Doug: Got it. Okay. Back to the beginning. Why did you have an interest in financial literacy? Was there some driver on that?
Steve: Oh, it’s, uh, let’s see if I can, I can boil it down. So I was traveling a lot for the day job. I was driving through Southern Illinois to the next location I had to go and audit and I bumped into, this is before CD players were in company cars.
This is before MP three players. This is before all that. And so I’m just flipping stations on the radio and I bump into. Dave Ramsey, who reminded me of Bruce Williams. And if anybody’s old who’s watching or listening to this, they might know who Bruce Williams was. But he was a fantastic, like, late night radio calling advice show.
Fantastic. So I was like, listen to this guy. I was like, well, this is interesting. They’re, they’re talking about money. I’m good with money. Why not listen to this a little bit? But he kept yelling at his audience, you know, call, tell him the callers, Hey, you know, cut up your credit cards. You gotta pay off your mortgage.
You know, all the, all the advice that is contrary to everything that I’ve been taught. So I was like, oh, this guy’s crazy. You know, he is a shock jock, all that stuff. But then I started looking at it and I was like, you know what, this guy is, right? So me and my wife, we thought we were doing good with money.
I realized we weren’t doing great with money. We’re just average. We’re average Americans, we’re average. We had credit cards, we are average. We had car payments, we were average. I was like, we should be better than this. So I, I went all in, cut off the credit cards. We paid off all our consumer debt. We were done by 2007.
Just had the mortgage left, started saving for retirement, saving for our daughter’s college, all that stuff. And I was like, this is good stuff. Why isn’t everybody else talking about this? Why is it only Dave Ramsey? I’m hearing about? And you know, then I heard, you know, there was a couple other people out there like Clark Coward and Susie Orman, but they also had different views on money.
I wanted to share my, what’s the word I’m looking for? My flavor, my. My, my brand of, of money advice and just share it with the world. And that’s where it got me into the blogging and the podcasting and offering financial coaching as well.
Doug: Got it. And it’s cool that you, you know, you hit the switch and you were like, you know what?
Like, we, we can do better. I never, I never got into Dave Ramsey and. You know what? A lot of the big personalities, they’re abrasive except for not Clark Howard. I, I grew up in the Atlanta area, loved AM radio too. And, um, I. Nicest guy in the world. Yeah. And, and Clark’s so nice. And you know, we, we have a mutual friend Joel, Lars Guard, who worked with Clark for many years as a producer, I think.
Right. Like at wsb. So it’s a, it’s a small, it’s a small world. It’s kind of, it’s kind of crazy ’cause I, like Clark was on the TV. News growing up. So he was like always a fixture. Anyway, Clark’s a nice guy. Some of the others are abrasive and like Dave Ramsey, you know, in our sort of social media world, like when I see his clips pop up, I’m just like, ah, does he, does he really think that, like he’s obviously a smart guy.
Like what is he selling? Like why is he so abrasive? Is it just to get clicks? And unfortunately, it’s probably like the click. The click thing. And you know, to get attention you have to be a little abrasive.
Steve: But then you’re saying he wanted to get clicks before clicks were a thing.
Doug: That’s true. Well,
Steve: yeah,
Doug: yeah, yeah.
So, but, but he, he’s a gateway. So to the whole point is like, he is a great gateway for people to like, get things under control and moving in the right direction. And at some point, I think probably Steve, you could fill in this. Portion, but like you, you do what you need to as far as like what Dave is, is teaching.
And then you’re like, okay, what’s, what’s next? I think there’s a little bit more, did you hit that point? And you’re like, okay, what’s next? And that’s how you got into the deeper personal finance space and blogging and all that.
Steve: Yes and no. I mean, he covers almost all the bases. Once you get to the final step of his baby steps, then you’re like, what is there more to it?
You could just live on the baby steps, but there’s a lot of people who just want to do more. They wanna get more deeply into what should I be investing in? You know, should I be doing more of A-A-E-T-F type thing? Or, you know, should get into real estate investing. He does talk about that, but not as heavily on what most people look at, which is the radio show and the television station, or the YouTube videos.
And, and that there’s, there’s no one way of personal finance for anybody. There really is not because you’ve got some people who are driven and they can create a business of their own. And there’s some people who just wanna make a living and support their family and then enjoy life in the margins around that work.
There’s no one wrong answer there. Finding the one right answer for you is the challenge. Of course. And that was my, I I was all in. I was like, I don’t need credit cards. I, I cut ’em up. People think I’m crazy ’cause I’ve been living without credit cards since 2008. I haven’t had a, a true credit score since 2017.
Yet we, I, I qualified for a mortgage under a self-employed income. Weird, odd person over here on this side of the camera. It’s my flavor and it works for me. It works for my family. It doesn’t mean that it’s gonna work for everybody. And of course, some people just don’t wanna have to deal with the troubles of, I say troubles is not really hard living on cash and cash equivalents.
They just they wanna live their lives the way that, that they’re used to, the way that they’re, they want to.
Doug: Very good. Okay, so you started blogging and then you started a podcast in, was it 2010? Did I catch that right? Yeah. Yeah. So very early days. And how’d that go? I mean, like at that point I. A lot of people had not heard of podcast.
I mean, for a lot of people the gateway was like, say 20 14, 20 13. Mm-hmm. 2014 with a podcast serial, which was like true crime. Exactly. I listened to Home brewing podcasts starting in like 2007, so I was pretty early and it was like, you know, the Dark Ages. Usually it was people that had broadcasting experience.
So what were those early days like in 2010?
Steve: Yeah. As far as for, for me doing a podcast, it was, it was more of a passion. I knew it wasn’t gonna grow big, but I knew it was gonna get a niche audience. And that niche audience was people who, there’s two niches there, people who knew what a podcast was and were listening to ’em, and that were interested in personal finance, money type topics.
I mean, you’re talking about drilling down to just a very small audience. So, you know, the downloads weren’t huge. They’re growing consistently over the years, but it never, never hit any kind of a, a big time monumental. No Joe Rogan here, that’s for sure. It was just, it was hard because people didn’t know what a podcast was.
They didn’t understand, because I don’t think Netflix was really a, a, a household name at the time. But when you think about podcasts, it’s on demand audio or video. Now, people understand that with Netflix, oh, I go to the television, scroll through the list, I hit the button on the thing. I wanna watch you do that with podcasts.
You just need a podcast app for it. And you were talking about how it started to take off in 2014 with serial. Interestingly enough, it was kind of like the, the perfect storm because it wasn’t necessarily Serial that made everything popular. It was the fact that Serial was mostly a we’ll say an American consumed show.
Mostly Americans would wanna listen to that. And it was like within a month after Apple made the podcast app native on their phones. So the podcast app was now coming out with all the phones. Automatically. So people are like, oh, what’s this purple button? And you know, they open it up and of course it’s gonna show you what’s hot now.
What’s hot now is serial. And so they’re, oh, let’s try this out. Ooh, true crime. That’s really interesting. So it was the perfect storm of, you know, making it easier for people to find podcasts. I. Make it, making it, uh, you know, visible right there on the front for what they should try. And then, oh, this true crime thing.
You know, everybody’s getting used to their NCIS and their CSI television shows. Oh, here I can listen to this stuff while I’m driving to work or whatever. So that’s, that’s kind of the confluence of, of how podcasting kind of exploded while I was almost winding down my show. Oh,
Doug: right.
Steve: Yeah.
Doug: How, how many episodes did you run through?
Steve: 200 I, I recorded the 200th episode. It was at FinCon. I had 10 different bloggers come up and just tell me what they learned about money while blogging about money. And that was released in October of 2015.
Doug: Got it. Okay. Yeah, it was
Steve: a nice little bow on top of everything there.
Doug: Did you do, do you happen to remember like the top number of downloads or any kind of stats from back in the day?
Just curious personally.
Steve: Well, yeah. There was a couple things that I did that made it peak. You could say the average. The average, the episode would get an average of up to 1500 downloads in the first 30 days, which is really good. But I was working on it for years. Yeah, yeah. Now this is before I-A-B-I-A-B is an organization that kind of put parameters around, you know, measuring what a real download is.
’cause there were a lot of bots out there, meaning things hit your website, they hit the play button, it plays it for a second and, or I don’t even know how the bots work. All I know is it wasn’t really a listen. So how many qualified plays were there? I don’t know. But I was always looking at, at the progression, not the total number.
A couple things that I did. One was I remember interviewing Joshua Sheets from Radical Personal Finance. We were talking about, oh, here we go. We’re talking about Dave Ramsey again. Mm-hmm. I forget the title, but something like, is Dave Ramsey Dangerous to Your Personal Finances, or something like that, or is that his advice, dangerous, or something like that.
Great discussion, and I recorded it in the hallways. Fin Con 2013 and gave him a copy and I was working on mine. I was editing mine while he released it on his, I didn’t know he released it on his show, but all of a sudden there’s this, this spike in downloads in in my Lipson account. I’m like, what’s going on for the whole weekend?
I’m like, I can’t figure out what’s going on, but all of a sudden I’m just getting tons and tons of downloads. Then I realized he had to released the show, so people were coming to my show after hearing it on his show. That was cool. Another thing, so this is all like gorilla marketing stuff. Another thing I did was in 2014, I came up with the idea of, you hear about the, the promo swaps and the show swaps or people being on other people’s shows.
Well, I decided what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna be on somebody else’s show as the host, so I’m gonna do their show as. As the host, like, you know, an April Fools Day joke. So it was April Fools Day of 2014 that not only did I do one for Cash Car Convert, but I did one for Star of the Doubts by Jared Easley, who was a founder of Podcast Movement.
And he had an interview show. He interviewed people and he’d always ask them questions and I asked him the same questions to him on his own show. So that was fun. But then the big one was Stacking Benjamin’s show. I am editing their show now, but at that time I wasn’t. We were just we were just friends in the podcast space and so I did the Stacking Benjamin Show for April 1st, 2014, in the same format that they do.
And I’ll tell you what, it almost killed me. It was ridiculous. ’cause you gotta have a co-host there. You gotta have the announcer guy. You gotta have a guest. Oh, it, it was insane. But because I did all those three shows, I was the host for their shows for that day. It was fun. But it also got me exposure on other platforms or other, other shows that were kind of in line with what I did or what I do at Cash Car Convert.
Definitely in line stacking. Benjamin is definitely in in line and so that definitely raised the, the average downloads that I was getting for at least the next three months.
Doug: Wow. And it’s all, I mean, those are the same things that work now that I, I’m like, oh, I need to do that more. But it’s like, you know, the cross promotion with just the right audience and you gotta bring, you know, good entertainment.
And for people that don’t know, stacking Benjamin’s is like, well, it’s called the Greatest Money Show on Earth. That’s their tagline, but it’s like a variety show. Absolutely. Those guys absolutely are pros. They like Joe Saul-Sehy, and uh, og, like they work really hard on that show, so when you do the editing, so all pros all throughout
Steve: and I get to edit the show, which again, it almost kills me every time.
Yeah. And they do like
Doug: three shows a, a week or something like that.
Steve: Three shows at least an hour long. I get 90 to two hours worth of audio and yeah, it’s a lot of work. But it’s also my favorite podcast. It’s been my favorite co podcast since before I edited it. So it was a natural fit when he came and said, Hey, I, I need serious help here.
Yeah. And, and I was like, Hey, I’m on board.
Doug: So I think that it’s a good, good time to like transition to like the editing portion. So you had your show, it sounded like, you know, you worked on it for a few years. You were, were winding it down. But it sounded like you maybe already started picking up some editing clients.
Talk about the transition from like that, that portion and you stopped your full-time job. Like things happen pretty quick.
Steve: It all happened pretty quick. It was a little too convenient how well it worked because when I tell you how it really worked out, you’re gonna be like, it’s crazy. So I, I had been wanting the financial coaching to be my career and I was marketing it with the blog and the podcast.
I thought, okay, I got the tools, I can do this. And I left the day job. ’cause it, it got to be where when I first started it was like 25% travel. When I left, it was like 95% travel. It was ridiculous. And I just, we had a daughter. I wanted to be home with my daughter sometimes and see her other than that on the weekends, and it just got to be too much.
I was like, no, I gotta go. So I, I made the leap into the financial coaching full-time. So I left the, the day job, it was March or May, I can’t remember, of 2015, focused solely on the financial coaching business, had the podcast. Was attending FinCon, meeting people, encouraging people, not trying to be a podcast editor or even helping people launch podcasts.
I was just, I was a creator like them. I was, I was wanting to learn from them just like they were hopefully learning from me. And it wasn’t until the end of 2015 where Paula pant from afford anything thing and Jay money from budgets are sexy. They had been talking all year about starting a show together.
This great idea. They have interesting chemistry. They’re complete opposites. People. Paul is very organized and, and she uses those, you know, $20 words and Jay money just wants to have fun and it’s just entertaining. So you put those two together, it’s just, it’s a weird chemistry. They couldn’t get it going.
And they’re like, let’s just call Steve. He’s always encouraging people to start a podcast. Let’s ask him some questions. So I’m like, sure, I’d love to talk to Paula Pant, Jay Money, who wouldn’t? So we get on the call and we’re talking through it all and they’re like, okay we just wanna hit record. Steve, will you do the rest?
I was like, I know how to do it. Sure. But I’m not gonna be able to do it for free. I mean, it takes a lot of work. And they’re like, absolutely, Steve, we’ll we’ll pay you. I think I was making less than minimum wage after it was all said and done. Yeah. But we launched that show, two big pod two big bloggers, big email lists.
It was in the top five of the business charts on Apple on the first day, which is just crazy unheard of. But yeah. You know, big email lists, of course. So I was just doing that as a side hustle. Then another show came to me and said, Hey, you know, I don’t wanna do the edit anymore, will you do it? So there’s more people in the space who heard that?
I was editing for Paula and Jay, so like maybe Steve will do it for us too. And just kept building, building. And I was like, okay, this is gonna be a lot of work, but I love it. This isn’t what I was signing up for. But I love it. I can still help the personal finance and, and spreading financial literacy by making these shows sound better.
Obviously the financial coaching thing was, was fun. I liked it, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t enough to make a career out of it. It was still stagnant. I was thought I could grow it and it didn’t work. So that failure pushed me into finally saying, okay, I give up. I’m gonna do this podcast setting thing full time, which was scary ’cause it even at that time it wasn’t.
A full-time income. It was about half of what my salary was at the old day job that I had left. But I didn’t have a company car either. So yeah, so that was mid 2016 when I was like, that’s it, I’m, I’m giving everything else up. The blog, the po I, I mean, they’re still out there, but I wasn’t gonna release anymore episodes and I, I had planned on launching another show, a new show.
That’s why I was retiring the old show and launching a new one. And that just never got off the ground ’cause. This, this confluence of luck kept happening in my life where I was able to then commit my full-time into building this podcast signing business.
Doug: Interesting. That’s so cool. And the thing is, like you, you started going to FinCon and like, when was the first one?
2011, something like that?
Steve: No, I missed the first one. I could only go to the 2012. That was the first one. I’ve been to every single one since.
Doug: Okay. When it, and it’s, and it’s like the timing worked out great with like what you were trying to do. And like the thing is like I, and I know how fun those conferences are, but also the networking and the relationship building.
So it’s like you were laying the foundation for the, at least the three previous years going to FinCon, but also like blogging and the other outreach and like you make friends online ’cause you’re. You’re consuming, you know, their blogs and you comment back and forth. It was a different time, like whatever, 50 years ago when all that was going on.
Steve: When it was fun.
Doug: Yeah. And, and now, I mean, people still read blogs, but like, things are, things are so different now. Okay. So that worked out really well. Let, let’s talk about. Pricing and people can go to your site and get like specific details and stuff. And that’s over at Steve Stewart. Me? Yes. But yeah, let’s talk about pricing in the early days and what you’ve arrived at now, and feel free to mention the exact prices which could subject to change you know, if people see this in the future or whatever.
Steve: Right, right. Well, I’m actually doing an experiment now, so I’ll get to that.
Doug: Okay.
Steve: So when I started and I was doing the Jay Money and, and Paula Pant, it was Money was the name of the show, money Show. Eventually got rebranded to afford anything after Jay Money left about a year, well, it’s 26 episodes in not a year later, but six months later.
Back then I was charging like 40 bucks an episode. And if you do inflation adjusted, it’s still like 40 bucks an episode. I mean, it is ridiculously low. Yeah, yeah, it is nothing. And, and it took me about three years of building, not just. Building enough work into my life where I could do this full time, but raising my rates along the way.
And, and there’s always that internal conflict of, am I really worth all that money? Should I raise it a little bit? Would they say no? Will I lose clients if I raised my rates? But yeah, I was raising rates up to, you know, good 125 to 150 bucks an episode. And that’s all based on time. There’s different ways to.
To to charge for services. It could be a flat rate, it could be a monthly retainer. There’s all kinds of different ways, but I was basing it on you gimme this number of minutes and it’s gonna be this amount. And if we go over that, then there’s an upcharge. And now we’re at about 3 45 for a full 45 minute recording That’s audio only.
So you can see the difference there. 40 bucks to like 350. It’s a, it’s a huge gain. But I’ve also, if you heard the the episodes I was editing back in, in the day, even on my own show, they weren’t great. I mean, I was able to edit, but not like, now obviously I’ve got my 10th dollars and hours in.
Obviously I’ve, I’ve learned some new things. I’ve got some better tools. AI is here to help with a lot of the really crappy audio. Oh my gosh. Sometimes I have to give up and it’s just like, throw it into this AI tool. Okay. That’s pretty good. I’m gonna have to use that. There’s a lot of of reasons why prices have increased.
And I don’t know where we’re going with this piece of the discussion. What, what is it that you want your audience to know about my pricing? I mean, I’m not trying to sell my services or anything.
Doug: No, no. This is perfect. Yeah, just, I mean, you had to come up with some amount and I, uh. It’s hard because you don’t know.
So you, you pick something and you move forward and you adjust it. And like, that’s the reality. Like you kind of have to find the, the the market price and what works for you. So you’ve tested, you’ve tested it out and Yeah. You know, you can keep going. So Yeah. You have like sort of a base amount video is big now.
Like how, how do you deal with that?
Steve: I don’t want to do high end video editing ’cause I just don’t have the time to learn how to do it really well. I do have a team member who does excellent video editing, but then of course the rate’s gonna be, it’s, it’s, it’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t pay those amounts for my services.
Right. But what I do is I do have an offer called Video Light, and if we wanna go into this, we could talk about video podcasting. For the most part, people are not video podcasting. They’re recording video and they’re putting it on YouTube, but they’re not video podcasting. They’re taking the audio, they’re putting it into the traditional podcast apps.
Spotify, apple, iHeart, Amazon Music overcast podcasts, all that stuff. But it’s not a true video podcast ’cause it’s not video there. It’s video on YouTube ’cause video. YouTube owns video. You say video. Everybody thinks YouTube immediately. No question. They just YouTube. Oh, I can find it on YouTube. ’cause everything is there.
There’s no barrier to entry, almost no barrier to entry. It comes already on all the things. So you get a phone, the app’s there, you get a smart tv, it’s already there. It’s on your computer. You have a browser, you can get there in no time. So it makes sense for video to be there. But I don’t wanna do the high end Mr.
Beast type of video production. ’cause it takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, which means it costs a lot of money and my clients don’t wanna have to wait also for the time that it takes to do all that. We’re trying to get episodes out once a week on average, something like that. So I do what’s called a video light package, and that’s going to give them what’s better than just people who puke up their Zoom recordings onto YouTube.
It’s gonna give ’em, you know, some music in there. If they have music and they wanna do a quick intro, it’s gonna give ’em lower Third, it’s giving ’em some overlays. We’re gonna take out the big rocks. The big rocks meaning it you know, if, if, if the Amazon guy delivers a package to the front door and the dog’s going crazy and they stop recording for a minute, we’re gonna take that out.
We’re not gonna leave it in. So they’re gonna get a better product than what they would normally do if they were to edit themselves. Edit them. Edit it. Them You gonna edit that for me? Edit it themselves.
Doug: We leave it all. Yeah.
Steve: This is real life folks. Every, everything but live we take out the big rocks, we make it look better, make it sound better, obviously, so that it’s gonna be, they’re gonna have a nice presence on YouTube and it’s not gonna be, I’ll say, disrespectful to their brand.
You don’t want to come out and misrepresent your brand by having just this long. Boring chitchat show when it could be a little bit better, a little more exciting, and, and we’re not gonna talk about the YouTube algorithm and why that’s important, but then they’re gonna have their expertly produced.
Audio episode and then they’re gonna have that video for YouTube to give them that exposure. ’cause YouTube is really for a podcast or it’s more like a social platform. It’s marketing for them.
Doug: Mm-hmm. You have the discoverability where, you know, absolutely. On the podcast side, it’s, it’s much tougher.
People kind of have to intentionally, they’re like, I’m bored. Like, can I find something else? And you know, there’s some suggested similar shows based on I. I think the algorithm is based on like other common listeners. Like if someone listens to my show and a couple similars, then other people that find that interesting.
Ah, similar to Netflix. Absolute. You know, that kind of thing. They, they know Yeah. Kind of what you like. So, yeah. Super interesting. With the, with the video stuff, it does get complicated and, and side story. I was interviewing Joe Saul-Sehy for my other show. Leaf blower shows up and it was like, ah, may be here for a while.
So we, we talked about it a second. We pushed through and we actually left it in. ’cause it’s just like my show.
Steve: Oh, it’s part of the story now.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like we have to leave it. Yeah. Could we, could we do this? And then it’s like, I think it’s okay. And then it’s like, it’s like, okay, but we talked about it.
So it’s a, it’s a thing in the show and it fits the brand, so it’s, it’s a little tough.
. One thing you mentioned in the pre-interview was. Profit First, and I think it comes into play a hundred percent for pricing. So can you give us a little overview on that?
Steve: Yeah. Profit First is a book and a method that was written by Mike Michalowicz back in around 2016. I really didn’t get into it until a couple years ago. Now I’m a money nerd, so I love all the things. I love the budgeting. I love balancing my checkbook, I love all those things. But when I learned about Profit First, I was like, oh, this is really good for small businesses, and it works for big businesses too, but.
This is a way where I can organize my finances and my business side and not have to think about it. It’s taking less time for me to do all that money stuff, which I enjoy doing, but it’s, it’s saying here, just put this aside. Let it run. And lemme explain what I mean. So, in Profit first, there’s really, there’s four primary categories.
Well, in, in a, in any business, you think about it, there’s four primary categories. You’ve got your expenses, obviously, right? You’ve got your taxes. Income taxes, things like that. You’ve got, uh, payroll, so you gotta pay yourself obviously. And then you’ve got your profit. Now, payroll and profit are two different things because you can set yourself up for a regular draw.
Hey, I’ll take out a thousand dollars every week, or something like that. But with Profit First, it’s incentivizing you to, in the personal finance space, we say, you know, save for retirement. So, you know. Put money aside for yourself. Pay yourself first, right? This is kind of the same for small business.
You’re paying yourself first by saying, I’m gonna take just this percentage of whatever comes into the business and put it aside for a little while and call that profit. So it forces you to look at all the other things then. ’cause now if you’re used to running, like in the old days, you would look at your income minus expenses, and what’s left over is profit.
Instead. Now you’re looking at your income minus your profit equals the expenses. The operating costs, the taxes, all that stuff. And it’s forcing you to look at those and make adjustments. A lot of people don’t look at the expenses as closely as they should, and you only look at your books twice a week or twice a month.
You don’t have to go in and look at your books more than that. ’cause you set up, so I, I have a bank account with this company called Novo. There’s also one called Relay. That one’s actually Relay is actually associated with Mike Michalowicz where. You’re, you’re opening up a business bank account. It’s a free business bank account, which is great.
You need to separate your, your personal from your business. So your business bank account is over here, and you say, all the money that comes into my business goes into this account, but these two types of business accounts, Novo or Relay, you can set it up so that a certain percentage goes into a bucket.
So one bucket would be operation costs. Another bucket would be that profit bucket. Another one would be taxes, and you can do a simple calculation on what you had been doing to figure out what those percentages should be, and then just start running from there and tweaking along the way. I was like, well, that’s kind of cool.
I know I’m gonna be taking 20% out for taxes and it’s gonna go into this bucket sitting over here. Great. Automatic. A thousand dollars comes in, 200 bucks goes right there. Let’s say I’m paying myself 50% payroll, 50% of that 500 bucks is gonna over this bucket over here. And so when I go in to do my books twice a month, it’s all done for me.
I already know I. I have all this money set aside for operating expenses. I have all this money set aside for taxes. I’m gonna throw that into a, a high interest savings account. I can take this money home, transfer it to my personal account. It’s already done for me. I don’t have to do anything. Now there’s still accounting and stuff that you’ll wanna do a little deeper than that ’cause obviously wanna look at your expenses to see.
Is there a recurring subscription that you no longer need? I’ve got a ton of those. You know, I, I. I was, you know, subscribed to this service and then the service over here started doing something similar and I didn’t need the first one anymore ’cause AI and all that stuff. So it really took a lot of the weight out of having to look at my books for my business and I could spend all more of that time talking to people, you know, making sales editing podcasts.
It was really a great organizational scheme for cashflow in my business, and it kept me from having to think about debt. I mean, you think about it, you’re, you’re putting money, you’re getting in and you’re putting it aside to be spent, and you could have those expenses automatically deducted from that business account.
So like, there’s a, there’s a tool I use called script. Every year a couple hundred bucks comes out. ’cause I’m using the script. It’s already there. I don’t have to look at it. Expenses paid out, done. It’s just great. There’s, there’s a lot less work that has to be done. It’s kind of automated. I.
Doug: Very good and it keeps you much deeper topic people could spend.
Well, there’s a whole book and much more about this, but you know, one of the biggest issues, people will screw up their cash flow, especially with taxes. And then I. You know, especially if someone grows fast and they’re like, oh, I’m all of a sudden making $25,000 a month and they’re spending a lot, well, yeah, you may have to pay about 30% of that for taxes, depending like how much money you make and the state that you’re in, and a few other factors.
So it could be pretty devastating if you accidentally spent all of that. But you had the personal finance background, so. Yeah, you weren’t gonna, yeah, you weren’t gonna blow it. But yeah, taxes can mess you up or cash flow if you don’t realize like, Hey, you have a big expense coming up. Or if maybe some of your vendors are paying you a little like 30 days later, or, you know, there, there’s some other factors that come in and it could screw up your cash flow if you, if you are not managing it that way.
So yeah,
Steve: cashflow is the number one killer of small business. It’s the, it’s insane. Biggest hurdle and the number one killer, and especially when it comes to income taxes, when you don’t have enough money to pay the income taxes.
Doug: Yeah. Okay. So this is great. Thanks for going in pretty deep on the pricing.
I know we only have a few minutes left. I have two main questions and then we’ll make sure people know where they could find you. And actually I wanna make sure like you have a very it’s a great. Thing for people to take like the next step if they’re interested in editing as well. You actually have a podcast editing academy, so we’ll talk, we’ll talk about that.
But I wanna make sure people hear it and they’re thinking about it. So any big challenges or mistakes? So timing was good. You figured out some pricing. Did you have any big blunders along the way?
Steve: Gosh, I should be ready for this question. ’cause everybody always asks that wonder.
Doug: Well, we can come back to it.
I can give you a, I can give you a second. We can come back to it and, and maybe not. I mean, sometimes you know you’re, well, I don’t want it to sound like Yeah. Don’t, I
Steve: don want it to sound like this has all been easy. It’s self-employment. Of course. It’s not easy. Yeah. Well, let’s, let’s stick with the taxes.
Yeah. ’cause that first, first full year that I was employed. I was like, okay, I gotta make sure I’m good on these taxes. I actually talked to somebody, I said, here’s what I got. It’s August of 2017. This is my first full year. Does it look like I’ll be within a thousand or $2,000 on my income taxes? And like, sure. I don’t know what happened. I’ve been trying to do the CSI on it ever since, but somehow my taxes that were unpaid, meaning I hadn’t put enough aside to pay my taxes, was like $6,000. I’m like, how could I be that far off? It was ridiculous. Of course, around that time there was some tax rules changing and stuff like that, but that was a huge problem.
’cause I mean, a couple thousand dollars. Okay. We can adjust things. We can, we can cut back on things for a little bit, you know, tighten our belts if we have to. I can maybe make some more money, send less to the contractors, do it all myself. You know, whatever I can to make that, you know, extra two, $3,000, but $6,000.
Yeah. The income taxes is really, yeah. That’s, that’s just the, I thought I was ready. I was right. I was all convinced. I was like, okay, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be pretty good for this first year. No, totally screwed up. And then next year I got like a $4,000 tax refund. I’m like, what is going on now?
Doug: And do you do do you have an S-corp or is it filed as an S-corp or is it straight proprietor?
Steve: It’s straight prop. LLC, sole proprietor. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah.
Doug: And um, yeah, none of this, and after all that tax advice by the way, so
Steve: yeah, I was gonna say, after all of those confusing things, I’m like, I’m gonna work with somebody for a bit. So I did hire an accountant for a couple years and got things.
I still don’t know how it all happened, but a couple, maybe, maybe a big lesson here is don’t be afraid when you’re going self-employed to hire out some help. Hire out for some help, whether it’s a contractor doing the work for you in your business, or somebody who’s gonna do those things that you don’t wanna do in your business, like bookkeeping or like the marketing, or heck, even managing social media or doing the website if you’re not expert there.
But you wanna, you know, master those things. Don’t try to learn how to do it yourself. That’s why I’m not getting into video editing. I don’t wanna learn how to edit video masterfully like that. Not yet. It’d be fun, but. I love what I’m doing over here. I wanna focus on that, but hiring out that help is, is really important.
Doug: Very good. Okay, so tell us a little bit about the, podcast Editor Academy, like who’s it for? Few details. And then I have a couple of like fun que fun questions for me. I don’t know if other people will find it fun, but yeah. What’s up with the academy?
Steve: Yeah. Well I started a Facebook group in 2017 called The Podcaster Club.
’cause there were no other groups in Facebook or anywhere I could find that was talking about the post-production side of podcasting. They’re all talking about, you know, what, Mike, do you use, or what media host, or how do you get guests or whatever? How do you grow an audience? I didn’t wanna talk about this.
I already knew about those things. I wanted to find more about this, this side of podcasting that didn’t exist. So I started a Facebook group and it started growing. I was like, well, this is cool. And then a a, a friend of mine became a business partner. His name’s Mark Deal. He was always turning these little dials in, in the podcasting space, and he’s, he just turned out to be a good friend and he’s like, you know what?
You should start an academy. I’m like, Hmm, really? Am I, am I good enough to do something like that? There’s a lot of people who are more qualified to. Advise people on editing than I am, but I think I’ve got enough for the school of hard knocks behind me to be able to, uh, to put this together. So we started the academy in the year 2000, right after the COVID shutdown.
And it’s to help people who want to do what I do, be podcast editors or managers or producers, or just be on that service side of podcasting, learn how to do it as a business so it’s not just. Like earlier you said podcast editing academy? No, it’s not about editing as much as it is about the editor.
Podcast. Editor Academy is about the person about helping them to grow a business and yes, of course there’s training and tutorials in there for them to learn how to do things, but it’s also about marketing and I’m able to help them find jobs from people come to me that aren’t the right fit. I’m gonna out, you know, I’m gonna offer that to people in my academy because.
We know that these people are serious about their, what they’re doing. They wanna make it a career. So they’re not gonna just be that person who’s on Upwork doing, you know, the occasional gig or two. These are the people who are serious about it. So I’ve been growing that thing since me and Mark have been growing it since 2000.
And it’s, it’s hard work. It’s not, not a whole lot of fun, but when you look back at everything that’s been built there, it’s like, wow, this is pretty cool.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. And I was gonna say like, I didn’t realize some of the people that have gone through the academy, I’m like, oh yeah, I know, I know that person.
Like I know the shows they’re doing that, that sort of thing. Yeah. So, yeah, highly recommend. No, no better person to learn from, I would say. So we’ll put a link so people can check it out if they’re interested in, in learning how to become an editor and go through the tutorials and all that stuff. So.
Steve: Great. Thank you.
Doug: And Okay. Couple quick fun questions. So you mentioned a script. I’m curious about like software and like some of your gear, like what mic are you using? So you could just kinda lay out like a quick, quick thing. I’m just, I’m just curious, you know.
Steve: Sure. Well, my, my main daw digital audio workstation, audio editing program is still Audacity.
They actually just. Celebrated their 25th birthday the other day. I’ve been using it for almost as long. I was using it before podcasting existed, so I just got to know it and I’ve just been able to master it and I’m so quick and easy with it. Now it’s, it’s like you don’t have to think about it, but there are other tools that I use for the post-production side that Audacity isn’t as good at.
There’s a tool called Isotope Rx. I remember the first time I heard about it, it was in my Facebook group, podcasters Club, and somebody said, why am I just now hearing about Isotope rx? It’s sorcery. So what you do is you bring your audio in and there’s, there’s a bunch of different tools you can use, but it’s just sweetens the audio and it’s all, it’s, it’s amazing.
Now, AI does a lot of this stuff automatically, but that’s, this is back then, but then when it comes to video or making clips and stuff like that, or even just editing in a different way, descript. It, it reinvented the way to edit. So people who are watching and listening to this envision that you have a recording, whether it’s audio or video, and you just drag it into this, this app on your desktop called descript.
It’s gonna create a transcript and everybody’s like, oh, so what big deal, right? Well, you edit the transcript and it edits the audio and or video. Now, it’s not perfect. It’s gonna cut some things a little too sharply or whatever. It’s not as gonna be as good or or detailed as I would be with Audacity. But when I’m looking at the big chunks, rearranging things, selecting items, I think, Ooh, this would be a good video short for YouTube.
You put captions on, it’s, it’s just amazing, an amazing tool. So those are the probably the three biggest tools that I use as far as the, the, the audio or video post production side.
Doug: Got it.
Steve: Yeah.
Doug: Yeah. Descript it wasn’t, it was pretty good at first, but now it’s gotten much better and I think I moved to it completely in my.
Couple VAs. You know, they’re, it’s been over a couple, couple years, but yeah, the fact that you could edit the transcript is huge, huge time saver. Like you said it, gosh, it’s not perfect. Gosh. But, um, a lot of this stuff, like if we have to stop and think, it’s just, you could be silent for a minute and then it’ll just take out, you know, all of that.
Make it half a second. Yeah. So you don’t have to struggle with it. Okay. And then what, what kind of mic you use there?
Steve: Oh, I have the Hi PR 40.
Doug: Okay.
Steve: What’s interesting is I didn’t want this mic. I didn’t want to want this mic. I was like, everybody’s, this is way back in the day. This was the microphone.
Everybody was talking about the the HI PR 40. I was like, well, everybody’s talking about the, hi, I don’t want the hi. But I went to a conference and they had like eight mics lined up and they’re like, here, test yourself on each one of these. We’re gonna give you the headphones. And so I was going up the line.
Here’s the Baringer, whatever. It’s like a $20 mic. Oh, here’s the ATR 2100. This is the one I’ve got. Great. I kept going up the line like, okay, this one looks good. This one sounds okay. This one sounds a little flat. This one’s way too basey. And then as I got to the hi, I’m like, okay, well I won’t like the hi.
And I went, alright, so this is testing the Hi. Ooh, hello baby. And it just fell in love with it. Yeah, so I, I had to have one and it’s, it’s been fantastic ever since. There’s a lot of other good mics out there, but this is a, a professional mic, meaning it’s not one you just plug into your computer. You need an interface to go between the two.
It doesn’t have USB cable is what I’m trying to say.
Doug: Yep, yep, yep.
Steve: In fact, I think you’ve got the, sure. Are you on the S Sure MV seven or the S seven seven B.
Doug: It is MV seven. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good eyes. Yeah. So it does have the USBI do have a small interface. It, it’s a pretty old like, I forget the name of the brand.
M Audio Scarlet.
Steve: Oh, okay.
Doug: Um, yeah, it’s like an M audio that I use. Oh, m audio for like guitar something or other. I think it great preamps. It might be like 15 years old, but yeah. Yeah. Occasionally I will plug this in via XLR, but then you have to use the preamp and blah, blah, blah. And I have three of these.
I was like, ah, they’re good enough. And I, I haven’t done a test, but these are, I mean, these are good mics. They’re supposed to be the same as the. MB or this what? What is the other one? SM seven B. SM seven B. Yeah, yeah. Although it was
Steve: a little bit better, but the MV seven is the USB version, which is, it’s 95% the same.
Doug: Pretty close. Yeah. So it’s really good. I have a couple of those back there for when I have people in the studio. We’ll sit back there. So, yeah. Okay. Very good. Well, Steve, this has been amazing. People should check out the academy. Where else could people find you out there?
Steve: Home base is Steve Stewart dot me.
That’s S-T-E-W-A-R t.me. ’cause the guy who owns steve stewart.com has owned it since 1997. I’m not getting it anytime soon.
Doug: Alright, well we’ll link up to all that stuff and thanks again. Really appreciate it. Thank you,
Steve: Doug. I appreciate being on. This has been an honor.