How To Catalyze Success: An Engaging Dialogue Of Maximizing Potential With Dr. William Attaway Of The Catalytic Leadership Podcast

Wish you were one of those influencers with raving fans who binge on your every word, consume all your content, buy everything you have to sell, and demand even more. Then stay tuned while Authority magazine columnist and buzzfeed contributor Tracy Hazzard shares strategies, tips and tactics from top videocasters, podcasters, authors, and social influencers on creating that bingeable factor. Now let's join Tracy as she explores how to rise above all the digital noise with the binge factor.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Binge Factor. I'm Tracy Hazzard and I have William Attaway Today. Catalytic Leadership Podcast. I love that name, Catalytic. That just sounds so explosive, but in a totally good way. William has been a student of leadership for 30 years and has been coaching leaders for over 20 of those years. From C suite leaders to educators, from military leaders to small business owners, church leaders to six and seven figure entrepreneurs, he's got experience helping conquer challenging situations and maximizing potential with focus, calm control, and confidence so you can build an unbreakable, unshakable business. I thought there was a lot of synergy between this thinking of scaling your business and scaling your podcast. And that's why I really wanted William to come on the show, because his 25 plus years of leadership experience doing coaching teams and helping people grow with staff and grow into larger organizations with systems and team and process, that just seemed to me like that was really synergistic with how some of you are growing your show. He's captured his insights that he's had from these decades of coaching in a book called catalytic leadership 12 keys to becoming an International Leader who Makes a Difference. And he's also been hosting this podcast where he's got over 50 episodes. So he's been walking the walk and talking the talk, as we like to say here. He interviews entrepreneurial leaders from with their insights and wisdom to what they've learned so far, the challenges they're facing, and. And how they're intentionally growing and thriving. So I really thought that I could learn a lot from William, which is one of the reasons I invited him on my show. So let's talk to Dr. William Attaway, catalytic Leadership. William, so glad to have you here. And talk catalytic leadership. And I love the term catalytic. It's explosive, but in a good way because it provides power. Right?

That's it. That's exactly it.

Yeah. We don't want explosive in a bad way, right?

No, that's a different show.

That's a totally different show. So you talk to leaders, but they are I'm going to say they're at a little bit more advanced level of leadership. It's not just any entrepreneur. It's someone who's really built and grown businesses so they have a little bit broader perspective. Do you have a specific target for those guests that you're looking for?

Yeah, I'm looking for guests that have gotten past the very early struggle stage and really have built a business that they feel like, okay, this is actually moving. Now we're actually going. What I find is that when entrepreneurs get to this point, they've had to begin to hire people to help them with fulfillment, for whatever they do, for whatever service they provide or product that they serve. And it's at that point that they really begin to face some different challenges, because you have to begin to develop the mindset not of a startup so much as the mindset of a CEO. Now you have to start thinking about leadership. You have to start thinking about leading other people on your team, not just yourself. Now, you're the hardest person you are ever going to lead, Tracy. No doubt about it. Me, too. But leading other people is a skill, and that's not one that anybody is born knowing how to do. So we have to learn it, we have to develop it. And so that's the people that I'm looking for, people who are in that stage who are struggling a little bit, saying, okay, this is a little bit more challenging, learning how to manage and lead other people.

It is a real challenge. It's scaling a business. And I think that piece of it that you've chosen to address is the biggest and most difficult piece. There's trust issues, like systems issues. I mean, it's such a different set of skills than it is to jump in, be an entrepreneur, start a company, and get an idea off the ground. Right. That's totally different skill set.

It is. And they're great at that. They've done that. They're past that part. But you have to level up. You've heard the phrase, you know, new levels, new devils. Okay, yeah. You've got new levels now, and you can't use the same strategies you've used before. It's like Marshall Goldsmith says, what got you here won't get you there. You have to learn something different.

Well, let's go back to the beginning about starting a podcast, because starting one and scaling one are two different things. And I wanted to set that tone right now for. Because you're at that stage where you're about to, like, take off, really scale it, and move into that Phase. Anyone who's been a year or more in their podcast or 50 episodes or more, that that's where they're at, and that's exactly where you are. But let's talk about the impetus for starting it. What was its purpose? And why did you think podcasting was the right thing for you?

You know, I'd had this in mind for years. Honestly, I'd been thinking, hey, this would be a really neat way to connect with people. I love to listen to podcasts. I used to have a long commute, and so I would listen to them back and forth, back and forth, multiple shows a day. And I thought this would be a great way to communicate with people in that they're receiving. Right now, podcasts are hot, and they're not going to get any colder. They're only getting hotter in the days ahead. So, okay, so how do I do that? And there's the logistics of it, and then the shows and programming and content and guests and. Oh, okay. The complexity tends to make one shy back a little bit. I had other things and other irons in the fire, and I said, this. This can wait. Last year, actually, in 2022, in January, I released my latest book, and I went on a podcast book tour. It was the first time I'd ever done that, and I was on something like 80 different shows between February and the end of the year. That's a lot.

That is a lot. Not the most I've heard, but that's a lot.

I got about halfway through that, and I was like, I'm really enjoying this, and this seems like something I could do. I had been taking notes, watching, learning from the hosts that I interacted with, how they did, what they did, the systems they were using, asking questions before and after the show. And so I felt like I was in a much better spot to begin to try it. And you don't get to 50 episodes without doing episode one. And so I said, well, we're going to start there, and we're going to learn and we're going to grow and we're going to get better. I'm firmly of the belief that that is a choice you and I make every day. Whether we're going to approach that day as a teacher where we know everything, or as a student where we say, hey, you know what? I'm going to learn something new today. What can I learn today? Who can I learn it from? I believe you can learn from anybody. Sometimes you learn what not to do. That can be incredibly valuable. And so I said, hey, let's get it started. So we started last August, actually, so it'd be almost one year now.

That's so, so great. I'm glad you dove in. I can tell the difference when someone's a listener. I can tell the difference in their show because, well, I've listened to enough shows now I can distinctly tell the difference. And what were some of the things that you were trying to put into your show that you felt were positive things about other people's shows?

I think the first thing was I wanted to ask questions that they might want to ask. And so I approached the guests with those questions in mind. So there's not a cookie cutter formula. There are some questions I'll ask everybody. But really, as I dive in now, doing pre interviews and beginning to build the episode in advance, it gives me the ability to script out questions and say, okay, this is a question I think I would have asked if I were just listening to this show. That's the first thing. The second thing is getting past the initial nervousness and awkwardness of doing this for the first 10, 15, 20 times to where I actually can be present fully in the moment when we're doing the interview and I can listen. And when I can listen, I'm able to script questions on the fly and chase something that they say and say, hang on a second. I want to follow that, even though I didn't plan it that way. That makes for a much more organic conversation, and those are so much more fun to listen to, in my opinion.

I can really hear that in your show. I can hear the way that you ask questions. They show a pre knowledge, which I didn't realize you were doing pre interviews. So I'm going to touch on that in a minute. But it makes sense now from what I'm hearing in the show. But you do follow. You follow the path, and I think that's the frustrating thing. And one of the reasons listeners will quit a show is if they're sitting back and someone's following their outline of questions and they miss the follow up. Right. And you just want to yell at your phone or whatever you're listening in, just yell, go. No, no, no, you forgot to ask this, like the important question. Right. And that's not the person you wanted to be. That's not the kind of host you want to be. The host that follows that because you wanted to be the advocate listener, because you know what it's like to be that listener.

Yes, exactly. There's so many times that I'm listening to an interview and the guest will say something that begs for a question, a follow up question just begs for it. And they don't ask. And I'm like, no, no, I want to know that. Ask this, ask it. And so I'm always listening for those opportunities, right?

Or they mentioned, hey, we're going to ask that or we're going to talk about that. And then they don't like. So let's get back to the one I dropped there, which was pre interviews. So so often we get a lot of people who are anti pre interview in the podcasting world, right? We get them that they, that guests who don't want to participate them, hosts who hate them because they think they're a waste of time and like they want to do it organically, on the fly, authentically on air. Right. You've chosen to add them in. Why? And what's the benefit for you, Tracy?

I'm a planner. It's how I'm made. I was just wired that way. I did not do them at first. I started just rolling right in. And what I discovered was there were so many times I wished I had and had I walked in with a little more information, a little more knowledge that wasn't on their guest profile, that wasn't anywhere on their social media, but I heard something and I wished I had had that before so I could have prepared for it and chased it. And after you do the same mistake two or three times, it's time for a change. I don't want to keep circling the same drain over and over and over again. So I instituted it. And you're right, some people don't like to do them. And if they don't like to do them, they won't do them and then they won't be a guest and they've made that choice. That's their choice. For me, it's really in line with everything else I do. I tell my daughters all the time, prior planning prevents poor performance. That old British army adage, right, this is important. Like you can do this. You can choose to plan and prepare. I've never regretted that. And since I started doing the pre interviews, I've never regretted making that choice.

So let's talk a little bit about it. The model of your guests. So are your guests your ideal clients?

Some of them are absolutely. Some of them are my ideal clients. Coaching clients are marketing agency owners. Right. And these are people who have built something to a point, but then again have to find a team and build a team and coalesce a team to focus on fulfillment that is a key. And so I do have marketing agency owners on the show, people that I think will add value because that's the audience who's listening. I want to make sure that every episode is going to add value to who's listening. I want to make sure that wherever they are, they can walk away with something that is of value that they can take and say, okay, I can do something with that. If I hit that in every episode, to me, that's a home run.

Right. Well, and see, because you, I'm going to say, focused on being in that right place, you do need to pre interview because you really need to make sure. What stage are you going to talk about? Where are you going to guide this? Because it is a journey for those who are listening and you need to make sure you don't drop something in that process that they really need to hear. Right now. I think that that is important. Plus, there's the added bonus of you potentially having an extra touch point with someone who might be your client, too, or might refer you to other agency owners who they know who should be your client. Right?

Absolutely. I mean, every conversation that we have is a networking opportunity. Every conversation we have, whether it's with a podcast guest, a podcast host, whether it's with somebody on LinkedIn, wherever it is, it's an opportunity to build a relationship. And it's not just what we get in the moment. You're building a relationship, like from here, going forward, I want to make sure that I'm adding value to those relationships. But if there's a way I can bring value as a coach, then I want to make sure I'm available for that as well.

So I always go over everybody's binge factor at a certain moment in time, and I kind of pick it randomly. Yours is right now. And this is the difference between your show and the others. And there are a lot of shows on leadership out there. There's no question about it. Yours has its own little edge with marketing agencies and other things. So it's found its place within that. But the difference really is that I'm going to say energy that you're bringing to it, where every opportunity to connect with my guests, to connect with my audience, to connect in that world is an opportunity and not a, oh, I have to do this to get my podcast out. I have to do this. Like, there's a lot of people out there, a lot of hosts out there, who are, I'm going to say, running through a plan, running through a system, but they don't feel the opportunity in it. And I think your energy in seeing that as the opportunity is really what makes me want to listen to your show because you're maximizing what you're doing. You're not just phoning it.

I think that's a mindset shift, and it's one that every one of your listeners can make. It's a choice you have to make. And it's exactly what you said. It's from a I have to to an I get to.

I get to. Right? Yeah. And it's coming across in your show because when I listen to some of the early episodes. Yeah, there's. And I always do it because I like to hear, like, how far you've come in terms of that. So that's one of the reasons I always pick, like one of the first episodes somebody does. But I heard maybe a little hesitation, a little lack of confidence in the process, but I didn't hear a difference in believing what you were doing. Like, that's definitely stayed continuous through your episodes that you've done. You believe that this is something worth investing your time and energy in. And it's coming across.

I love that. Thank you for that.

You're welcome. Well, let's talk a little bit about the scaling model. Right, so you're hitting that year point, that one year and 50 plus episodes, and you're thinking maybe it's time for a little shift. Maybe it's time for some adjustments. It's time to scale. What's next for you here?

What I'm doing now just in the last two weeks shifted to producing once per week to now producing twice per week. And so two episodes a week is a different level of commitment. But what I found was that I had so many guests that I had connected with and we had set up a pre interview and I wanted to proceed. So we did the recording and they were just backlogged. And I thought if I just go once a week, I'm six months ahead. That's a long stretch between recording and when it goes live. And so I made the decision. I'm going to go ahead and get this backlog going. Like, we're going to go twice a month, twice a week for a while to do that. So that's something new I'm trying. We'll see how this works. We'll see what the response is from the audience, the listeners, if they say, whoa, too much or if they say, no, we really enjoy this. Give us more. It gives me a chance to have more interviews. I'm now talking with people that I was not talking with previously. Previously, I had been really limited to PodMatch, and that's really where I had found all of my guests. Now I'm talking to people on LinkedIn and PodMatch and talking with people just straight out in LinkedIn conversations. And once I see a little bit more about them and what they're doing, inviting them onto the show, if they would like to have a conversation about that. So that has increased the pool, as you might expect, exponentially. And so there's so many good people that I want to talk to. Again, my goal was to have conversations that I would want to listen to. Right. Well, there's a lot of conversations that I'd like to listen to, so I'm going to have as many of those as I can. I think two a week is enough. I'm not going to go any more than that. But this is a way that I can really increase the number of people that I'm able to talk to and listen to and share their stories, highlight and spotlight them and help the people who are listening.

It's so good that you're doing that because you've invested a lot of time into producing the episodes because you do a pre interview and then the interview, and then if you wait that long, there's a loss of momentum from the guest sharing it. And so that can actually have a detrimental effect on the popularity of the episode, the circulation of it. And then it's really not getting out there anywhere, but to the subscribers that you've already worked your butt off for, you're not growing that. Right. So I think that that's so smart and it's one of the things. I actually just did a coaching call in the last month or so about this thing, and so few people want to amp it up. You know, sometimes it's budget, and I totally get that. It's hard to produce episod and it's a budgetary issue of doing more than one a week. But at the same time, the loss of value in getting that guest to promote your show seems not worth it to me. And I'm so glad you've decided to do it. I do think you're right about it. It's a tipping point between the value from the guest and the circulation to getting new subscribers against. Do I overwhelm my existing subscribers? Is this too much of a pace? But I think two is not bad. You know, you go five days a week, all of a sudden from one, that's a totally different show, right?

No, Doubt. And I don't have the margin for that.

Yeah, exactly. It's a lot. So I think that's really smart and I'm really glad to hear you're doing that because I've seen that where shows are way far ahead and I do see their growth is stunted and it just simply is because that sharing energy just isn't there.

Yeah. From the beginning I knew I needed to stay ahead and my goal was to be four to six weeks ahead.

That's kind of optimum. I agree.

Yeah. I was like, that's a good spot. But again, so many of these conversations just kept coming and kept coming and opportunities and I was like, I'm going to lean into that. Of course I am. And then all of a sudden I found myself with a couple dozen episodes.

Recorded and you're like, woo, I'm ahead. Yeah, way ahead.

Too much of a good thing.

I can see why you would book. So a lot of people were like, I only booked two appointments on my calendar a week or I only book one. So you can't get that far ahead just because of how they do it. But I could see just sort of from the way you are as a person, all the books behind you on your shelf there, you were like, this is a learning opportunity. And so you just were like basically accepting the conversation and the power of the moment. Right. And I could see you doing that. And so you find yourself so far ahead all of a sudden. But I'm glad you really worked out that mechanism for making sure that you kind of flow through it without saying, okay, I'm just going to take my foot off the gas and coast for now.

Oh yeah, I'm not a coaster. That's not my nature. I tell people all the time, you never drift into excellence, you drift into mediocrity. I'm not interested in that.

Such good advice there. Well, let's talk a little bit about the challenges to scaling at this level and you going up to two episodes. That's a challenge in and of itself, just functionally. But what are you finding now? The biggest challenges for you going into year two?

I think the time involved to go through all the, all the pre stuff, the pre interview, the scheduling, the rescheduling. When something happens, somebody has to reschedule all of that. Getting everything recorded and then the back end. Right. The editing, the production, all of that and the uploading, I mean, I'm still doing all of that. And so like that's a pretty significant time commitment. And now I've doubled it that's more time. So what I'm finding now is, okay, I need to be really intentional about the time blocking that I do to make sure that I can stay ahead. But that requires a lot more time. Now that's a big challenge for me. I've just got to be more intentional with it. I mean, we all get the same 168 hours a week, and nobody puts anything on my calendar except for me. So knowing that if my calendar is too full, if I don't have any margin, I only have one place to look, really, for the responsible party, and that's right in the mirror.

Wow, I love that. Owning up to that, scheduling, that time, that situation of so many episodes you got yourself into, like owning up to that and just figuring out a path for that. The indicators in your show, your episode titles, your descriptions, you can tell you put really good time in it, but you also have best practices and you know what's working. And so I see a lot of maximizing a value coming from the effort that you're putting in. Certainly not wasted effort. That's the one thing I can tell for sure. There's a lot of things that people do that are not worth the time. They're worth the energy that the part that you're putting time into is worth it. It gets to the point where our shows have a level of professionalism that is necessary for us to live up to how we want to show up, but also it is a lead generator for us, and we need to play at a specific level. And agency owners are a little picky. And if that's your audience, then you want them to that you know what they're dealing with, you know what they're doing. Right. So you do want to have that. And so it does have to match your audience.

Yes, no doubt. I have to be intentional about the people that I know. Clients that I know who will listen, like, would they choose this show? Would they pick this out? Is this an episode? They would choose and say, oh, yeah, that could help me. What's the title? Is the title going to draw them in, or is the title something they say, man, whatever.

Well, and too often I find it, people are just like, oh, I'll just put the person's name and they'll recognize it. But that's not the case. Especially somebody in a scaling, growing business at the level you want to reach them. They're so busy that they don't always know what's going on in their own industry. So name recognition means nothing to them. But topic that means something, and that's what you're putting in. Putting in both makes a difference. So don't stop that. You're doing that right. Don't stop that. That's really good. I'm glad to see that. What occurred to me, though, is that there has to have been over the last year, some return on investment for your time and whether that's in direct monetary value that you've received, like business that you received. But there has to be something that's feeling to you as a return on investment. What are those things that you've found over the last year?

I think the first thing I would say to that is the comments that I get, the feedback that I get from listeners when somebody says, hey, this episode really hit me. This episode, the questions that you asked and what they said. This information is really going to help me move from where I am and where I've kind of been stuck. This is going to help me get unstuck. This is going to help me move closer to where I want to be. So thanks for sharing that. Like, when I hear something like that, that makes me feel like we did a good job with that one. That was center of the bullseye. And the more shows you do, the more feedback you get. I read every review on the show. I want to know, like, what people are thinking. I want to know, are we hitting the center of the bullseye? So when I hear those type of things, I mean, if you're familiar with the five love languages, mine is words of affirmation. So I'm going to hear those things. When somebody says, this really helped, this was help value. I'm going to hear that, I'm going to receive that. And I'm going to say, this is the fuel I need to do 100 more episodes. I've also gotten clients from this, and that's been another thing that people have seen value in the show and said, hey, I want to have more conversations. I think there's some wisdom here that would help me move from where I'm stuck to where I want to be. And so I'm able to come alongside them then as a mindset leadership coach and help them in that way. So that has been something as well. My goal really is to help people where they are. A podcast is a tool that I can put out there for free that people can benefit from, whether they can afford to hire me as their coach or not. They can benefit from so much insight, so much wisdom that people share that they can listen to anytime they want.

Yeah. And I think that it's so true that we put these things out there and getting that feedback loop happening is a tipping point for a lot of people. It's the part where I said, I can keep going with this. This is having the effect that I want. And then the business comes always a little bit after that. But it does come when we start to hear that value.

Yeah. It was six or seven months after I started, before I got a client from it.

Did you get a client from your listeners or from your guests first?

From a guest, actually.

Yeah. Then that's typically what we see as well. Right. It'll start in the guest, and sometimes it's not just the guest becoming a client, but it's the guest referring somebody who's ideal because of the conversation you had. So that can happen as well. You did the guesting first, so I want to do a little conversation on the contrast between the two. Did you feel that same kind of connection in the guesting that you feel in your show? You're still only having one to two conversations with people, so it's not that dramatically different. Do you feel a difference between guesting and hosting?

It is different. It's a very different experience. It's still an opportunity to build a relationship. And I think I did not realize that quite so much early on in the guesting and because there were so many of them. I mean, one month I had 19 different interviews. You do that many inside of a month. It just begins to feel like it's rote and you're not really connecting because you're thinking about the next seven shows you've got that week. And that gets into a different thing, really. When I started to realize this is a relationship opportunity. This is an opportunity to listen, to hear, to get to know and to invest into somebody. When I started, when that light switch came on, it's like, okay, this is different. This is an opportunity. Let's see it that way and let's leverage it. Like, let's not waste this. This is a chance to talk to people I would never talk to otherwise on both sides of the table.

I think it's really different. Once you have that perspective of being a host, you start to see, well, there's intention in a show. Right? You have an intention. You have an audience that you want to meet. And so I think it makes us a little more discerning about our choices of who we guest on.

For sure. No doubt about that.

Right. Like, you may not have chosen those 80 shows you did before this time around. If you Were doing it again because you understand that from doing it 100%.

These days, I'm going to research a show before I appear on it because I want to make sure I'm going to add value in the way that they add value to their listeners. I want to make sure I'm not bringing something that's going to be diametrically opposed. And I'll turn down way more shows than I'll appear on because I'm not a good fit. And if they don't see that, I see that and I don't want to show up. And then they have to figure out how to make this work. That's just not honoring to them as the host.

Yeah, definitely. Well, let's talk a little bit about the challenges that most of your clients are facing, which is this idea of them scaling with team. They get bringing in team, and it's at this level. You know, this happens at a tipping point on a lot of podcasts, about a year to a year and a half in somewhere around there, they decide I need to get a team in. And it goes horribly wrong sometimes. What are some best practices that you found in that sort of team growth side, when that moment happens that you're about to add staff or add agencies or add other things into the mix of it for you and stop doing things yourself? What are some best practices? What are some things that we can look for? Mindsets?

I think the first thing I would say is this, that moving from a freelancer to a team leader is a big shift. And if you are hiring that team from scratch, you have to understand that you are creating the DNA of the team. You're the leader. The DNA is your responsibility. You cannot abdicate it and you cannot delegate it. And so you have to be very intentional in how you are going to create the DNA of a team that you're starting from scratch. What's it going to be like? What do you want it to feel like to be a part of this team? You decide that. I watch too many leaders go one of two directions. Either they abdicate the leadership role, say, I didn't sign up to be a boss. I got out of that world. I don't want to boss anybody. I'm just going to. Everything will be flat. It's all going to be flat. Okay, well, that's a terrible decision. That does not go where you want it to go. That road doesn't end well. Or they say, okay, I'll figure it out as I go. I'll build the plane while I'm flying it. And then as they're driving, they hit every single ditch you can imagine on that road because they've never driven before. Both of those are bad. And there's a better way. The one thing I would say, when you're building a team, the one best practice, and I say this all the time, I would rather have nobody than the wrong body. Who you choose to be on your team matters. You do not just want to get a warm body. You want the right person. I like how Jim Collins says companies always say, our people are our most important asset. He says, that is absolutely wrong. The right people are your most important asset.

We are deluding ourselves when we say we're going to go in and hire an assistant, a virtual assistant. An assistant. That's not team building. That happens all the time. And someone's like, oh, I'll just put an assistant on and it'll be fine. I don't have to deal with culture. I don't have to deal with any of these things. And I'm thinking to myself, boy, you don't know.

But what you're gonna learn, yeah, you're.

Gonna learn the really hard way on how you're represented out there, how you don't have any systems and processes. You're only as good as what that person brings. It really is not something that they go into with the right mindset about it. That's the one thing I see is they treat assistance as a very different model. Like, it's not team.

They treat them like cogs in a machine. I need you to do this task and do this task this way, and then that's all I need from you. Thank you very much. The problem is people aren't cogs and they don't like to be treated like cogs. And when you treat them like cogs, guess how they are going to treat your clients or your customers also like cogs. It will pass through, I don't know, a client or a customer that wants to be treated like that. And if it happens more than once, it won't happen again because they'll go somewhere else. You choose the people on your team. If you're building, you get to choose that. That's one of the joys of being an entrepreneur. Do not fall into the trap of thinking, well, they're just a contract. They're not really an employee, they're just a contractor. I'm just hiring them to do this thing. They're part of your team and you get to create the DNA for your team. And that's going to pass through them to the people that you're serving.

Just thinking about this, as you were saying that it's with your target client being a marketing agencies or agency owners in general. And if they don't get this right, that's one of the very big problems with it. And when you hire an agency, you're not just hiring the owner. And if they've not done their job right, the DNA of it is not following through. It's why, I mean, I see people burn through a lot of agencies on the other side because they didn't get what they thought they were hiring.

Absolutely. They thought they were hiring the person that sold them, the person at the top. That's not who you're getting. You're getting their team. It's so, so important. And I watched too many people hit the ditches on this. And there's a better way. There's a better way. You can be intentional. You can invest in people and build a team where they feel valued. And when people feel valued, one, they're going to stick around. Two, they're going to pass that value on to your customers, your clients.

Ah, so, so important. Well, now all of you know why I invited William on the show. Because I wanted to pick a sprain in here about this. It's really important to find shows out there that speak to you at the same time that you might be researching something, that you might be checking out and investigating shows that you want to be a guest on. Right. That you, that you might want to have on your show. There's all those things out there and as we're doing it, we listen for these things, these things that are going to provide us an opportunity to learn. And I love that you put it that way, that, that every chance is an opportunity for you to learn and that's who you want to show up as today. It's my number one reason why I invited you on because I knew I wanted to learn from you, William. So before we go, what is your I'm going to say advice to our startups are ones who maybe didn't get, hasn't gotten their show kicked off yet.

Get started, just get going. You're never going to get to episode 50 until you do episode one. And you're going to learn things and episode one is not going to be great. My episode one is not great. My episode seven was not great. My episode 15 was not great. But over time, you learn and you develop and you adjust and you evaluate and that's how you get better experience. Does not make you any better evaluated. Experience makes you better. So you evaluate every episode. You learn what you ask what went right, what went wrong, what would I do different next time? And when you ask those three questions, you're going to carry that learning forward. If you haven't started yet, start now, get it kicked off and understand all the things I just said. You're not going to start with hitting on all cylinders, right? You're not going to start with a five star episode, but you're going to learn.

William, I'm so glad you've got the Catalytic Leadership podcast out there. Glad you're headed into two episodes a week because that's going to be really valuable. Have some great conversations and I look forward to seeing who's on your show next.

Tracy, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun.

One of my favorite things about getting to meet new guests is learning something right. It's a curiosity model for me to learn what other people are doing, how they're doing things right, where they are stumbling because it gives me opportunities of things that I could create or ways that I could provide support. All of those things really come together. But the thing that I love the most is I love to invite someone on my show first. I like to be the first gift. I like to have them on my show and then let them see if there's synergy and if they would like to invite me on their show. I never invite myself first. It's not a strategy that I put in place. And what it does is exactly what William does in his process where he's pre interviewing. In a sense, when someone's coming on my show, I'm pre interviewing them about whether or not their show has synergy for me and I even want the opportunity. So it saves me time and energy. But more importantly, it really demonstrates a mind share of value between the two. And if it clicks and if it's right, then I know we're going to support each other better. And so I'm a big fan of the pre interview model. From a discerning podcaster mode, it might not be the way to go in the beginning when you're building your show because, well, frankly, you need more guests, right? And you don't always know what guests are going to resonate. And so sometimes the pre interview process can screen people out because they don't have the time to do it, or if they're a seasoned podcast guest, they just are not going to participate in that. And that's okay later on, but maybe early on you want that? So I love that William built this in and he's over 50 episodes and he decided along the way that this made sense for him. It got him better content, got him better connections. It might even get him better clients and better referrals. Right. As it's going forward for him, it's going to do more and more of that. But he found that this is a way for him to stay authentic to the goals that he has for the show. Really create a value add for all involves the guest, the listener and himself as the host and his business in that process. Right. So I look forward to getting to know William some more as we go along and seeing how he grows his show into the next stages and everything. Because I loved the way he talked about evaluating everything along the way. It's great to have an experience, but if you're not evaluating that experience and knowing did this work for me, was this right for me? That's such a valuable insight right then and there. So if you take nothing away from what you heard today, and I hope you're going to take a bunch of things away because I certainly certainly did. But take away this idea that at each stage of your show you should be evaluating, how did that go? How did that feel? Is this something I could keep doing? What should I try different next time? And making these small adjustments along the way are going to head you into a big result on the other side. Every little improvement you make can have a magnifying effect. So Dr. William Attaway, catalytic leadership. I want you to go check out his show and listen. Not just because you can hear some great tactics, some great ways of doing things. But his guests are all agency owners. A lot of them are marketing agency owners. You are going to pick up a lot of tips on how to market your show just by listening. I randomly pick three episodes and I got some three really great ideas nuggets from each episode of things I could be trying, things I could be doing different in my marketing. So I know that you're going to find the same as well. So go check out catalytic Leadership everywhere you listen to podcasts and your favorite app and friend and follow Dr. William Attaway. Thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracy Hazard and I'll be back next time with another Binge factor host and let's hear how they're taking their show to the next level.

You've been listening to the Binge Factor podcast. For more information on podcasting and videocasting success tips and tactics, please go to thebingefactor.com and be sure to listen to our other show for podcasters called Feed you'd brand. If you'd like to be interviewed on this show as well as featured in Tracy's column, please go to thebingefactor.com guest and apply.

Sam.