*Podcast Succession Planning: What Happens to Your Show When You're Dead?

This is Feed you'd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard.

Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. Today we're going to talk about the show host is dead. So now what? Succession planning for podcasters. And you might think you don't need to worry about this, but we can tell you from experience, actually, it's happened quite a bit in our experience where the show host has literally died or has gone to jail. We've had that happen a couple times and maybe one happening in the future that we know about of people we work with. And we're just one company in the podcasting industry. So, I mean, this happens and there are things to talk about.

So it's double in the news this week. I mean, many of you may think we're referring to Charlie Kirk, and of course he had the Charlie Kirk show, so he definitely had a podcast. And in a way we are. But more relevant to the podcasting industry and more prominent in the podcasting industry is that Blueberry's founder, Todd Cochran died and that left his show.

Yeah, he died. That's both within the last week, I think, isn't it? It was like Todd Cochrane was a day or two, a day or two before, and surprising. He was only 61 years old. Died of natural cause. I mean, just not violence or anything, but just died. And we've had a podcaster in the past literally get indicted and arrested by the SEC and the federal government and is now serving a federal prison sentence. And so that show ceased to publish new episodes overnight.

So there's other unexpected events, though, and I want to touch on that. Right? So these. There are unexpected events where the host, the main host, the passion behind it, the voice behind it is gone. And some of them happen through really unfortunate circumstances, and some of them happen as a part of a plan that you may not have been aware of and you didn't know about. So we've had coasts who left their firm and started a new one, a competitive firm. We've had hosts that had a falling out with their partner. Sometimes they're the co host or the occasional co host, but they're the main anchor of the show. And so these things happen all around. Illness happens. We've had quite, unfortunately, quite a few hosts with cancer over the years, family.

Deaths, some that came back from cancer, thank goodness.

I know just this morning I heard of one, and I was very excited to hear that. And so anyway, you know, I mean, we want to hold space for them, but the podcasting world keeps moving, your listeners move on, and things are happening. And so we try our best to give you advice about how to preserve this legacy that you're creating, this intellectual property base you're creating. So I want you to think of it that way. This is both an asset and a legacy. So it has both that emotional connection to it, but it also does have value, and we don't want to forget about that. In the scope of things that you put a lot of sweat and tears into your podcast, many of you, you put your soul into it, and we want to make sure that it gets preserved in the proper way, that original voice and passion can somehow survive it.

So, you know, Tracy, I think for a lot of people listening to this podcast or watching this video, they may think, all right, well, I'm in my 20s or 30s, or even if I'm in my 40s, 50s, 60s, whatever, I'm not going to die anytime soon. And you know what, if I die, my show, it'll just end. And, you know, I'm not going to spend a lot of time planning around this. I can understand that. But. But I want all podcasters who are hearing or seeing this to understand your podcast, especially if you do it regularly and consistently and you're anything, 25 episodes or more, hopefully your podcast has a lot of value, even street value, as a podcast listing. We, you know, we have sometimes podcasters who are starting a new show and they want to really accelerate the launch of their show. They want to kill it. They want to get as many listeners as they can. And you know what? Sometimes we have sold them a podcast listing someone else's show that already existed, that overnight gets rebranded for your own. And guess what? You start your show with a whole installed base of listeners, followers, subscribers, when you do that. So that's just one way, and there are many that a show that you've been creating for years, even if you cease to exist, it has value, tangible value to other people, aside from just the content value of your message to the world you've put out there. I mean, there's different kinds of value, but even if some were to wipe it out, your listing has value.

Yeah. And that's where we mean this is an asset. So there are two things that Tom and I want to really emphasize, the two most important things that give you the ability to do what is necessary with the show. The number one thing is you have to have access to the email address that the show signs up for hosting company with. Right.

Oh, my goodness. Can we Put a huge exclamation point and emphasis on this right now, Tracy, because I just had this happen today that before recording this, another podcaster moves a show to politics. Publish a new episode, and guess what? It didn't show up on Apple and it didn't show up on Spotify. Why? They thought they had control to the right email and the right identity of their show, and they really didn't, right?

So whoever controls the RSS feed controls the show. So that means if your company's email controls the show and you no longer work for that company, it's gone. It belongs to the company, not you. It doesn't matter. You can go through a whole bunch of, like, see if you have a name, image, likeness claim, and. But you're going to end up in a lawsuit over a show that, you know, probably didn't make a ton of money, right? So not going to be worth it. At the end of the day, almost everybody who runs into that situation walks away. I haven't seen anyone do anything but negotiate their way out of it or end up losing their show. So that email address is the critical factor to show control. The second thing is you should have a contract with yourself, even if you're with your company, no matter who the company is, even if it's a solopreneur. I think of our good friend Aaron Young, and he does this lecture and speech about veil protection, which is like, you know, the corporate veil, right, the corporate veil. And you have veil protection. And he said, well, too often that people are solopreneurs, right? And so you have a single member llc or you have a. You know, you're the only owner. And so you have a meeting with yourself in the shower and you bring it to order like you're not going to do it, right? Like, that's just silly. And then sign, you know, sign minutes and do the thing. You're not going to do that for something, but here's a case where you should, because this allows your family to have the legacy, this allows your podcast to live on. This allows the transfer of that, if that's what you want. So by creating the contract with it, saying the company can have the content on the website or that, but they can't have my voice, they can't have my image that belongs to me, you could make a contract with yourself for that. That way, if it went bankrupt, you could still have that. Like, those things don't belong to the company. There are many, many ways in which that can be of extreme value now, especially in a Situation where I was referring to before, where, like, you have a law firm and a partner leaves and starts, goes to a competitive law firm, and they were the voice of the podcast and you don't have a contract. Do you know how many times I've seen law firms not have a contract?

We just had it happen within the last month that a podcasting customer of ours who is a lawyer at a firm and was one of the partners in the firm, but then the firm got acquired by another firm overnight, all activity on the podcast stopped, and there is so much red tape.

And they already recorded 12.

Yeah, they had already recorded 12, but had not launched the show yet. And now this thing is in permanent potential. We don't even know if it's going to launch. You know, the new firm came in and had a meeting and all right, what's this all about? What's going on? And I don't even think they fully decided what to do with it yet. But I'll tell you what, it's going nowhere fast, right?

And so these things happen. We've seen it happen in the chiropractic world. We've seen it happen all over the place that there's just this lack of decisions. Most often with acquisitions, when a company comes in and acquires the. They wipe the slate clean and take away everything and destroy all the asset value underneath it, which really means, wouldn't it be great if it could transfer to you? But it doesn't. It doesn't unless there's a contract in place. And so I recommend, and I'm not a lawyer, but I recommend a first right of refusal, meaning that and no payment for $0. But for your effort put in that you write a first write a refusal, saying if they shut down the podcast, delete the blogs, remove the videos, whatever it is, that you have a right to reclaim them, re edit it and obviously remove their brand if that's what's necessary. But you have a right to it because it's your voice that gives you the ability at least to do one of the things I'm going to suggest in a few minutes. So keeping this in mind, in order to preserve that, remember that your family, if you die, your family may want to honor you. There may be something they want to do with that. There may be life and legacy. I actually was really impressed with the concept of the vice president coming into Charlie Kirk's podcast and hosting it. So having a guest host who creates an honor. They did the same thing with Todd Cochran. As far as I know, he aired his last episode. And I think there's going to be an honor episode coming up.

There's something going on, but there's definitely an organization that's going to do something. In the case of Charlie Kirk, I mean, having a vice president being willing to step in and host your show, I mean, amazing, because now there's so many more eyeballs and ears on that show than there ever was before. Because, I mean, the vice president doesn't host a show every day.

Right, Right. So he helped retain the organizational value. That was better than a donation is what I'm going to say. Like you could have made a donation to his organization, but that was better because that's going to bring followers and more donors and have an ongoing legacy piece to it. That is important. So if you can create something like that, then go ahead and do that.

Yeah, I agree, it's. That's amazing.

But you must work with the family because it's not okay. It's not. In this case, there's a lot more closeness to the organization and the family. So it made more sense. And obviously it was in the wishes of the widow because that was expressed at a press conference. So make sure that you do right by the host. That is gone. Also, if like you do, the firm that breaks up, do not be bashing the past, you're going to invite a lawsuit. So definitely don't do that. That think about how that's going to happen if you want to honor it and continue it. But here's a couple of options. If you feel uncomfortable with the idea of continuing the podcast. If you feel uncomfortable with any amount of like you feel like you want to wipe this clean, here's a couple of things that you can do. You can take all the content and turn it into blogs. That way you can do some light editing in there because it doesn't have to follow exactly what was said. And you can do some light editing in there to make sure that it sounds still like it belongs to the company. Now you've taken it from a voice and a personality and turned it into thought leadership and topic based thought leadership, which may be very important to your company and your business. So if you had a big divorce attorney firm and everything broke up, but these topics of relationship and divorce were discussed on the show, you're now keeping that and retaining that asset value in the blog of the website. If the conversations are not something that you want to be associated with, then maybe they were a little contentious or they just were not the style that you want. You can then Take those blogs and turn them into articles instead. We do that all the time at our company. I do that where I actually do both. We have the full length blogs because they're really valuable to the Google value of the website and the topic based conversations that are happening. But I also do create shorter articles from them. So you could do something where you're creating a blog that was out of that episode, which is really easy because then you don't have to do as much writing. You can use Ghostwriter, you can make it really simple. So that's another way to continue it. But creating website value is extremely important. And then number two, use it in AI. Take that voice and create an honor agent. Preserve that legacy. Create a clone, with permission, of course. Right. To honor that podcast in a agent model, or at minimum, make sure that you take that content and put it into your own corporate agent and absorb the voice, absorb the concept, absorb everything into the language model that becomes a part of that agent. So the learnings aren't lost, the content isn't lost in that way. It's still informing your organization and helping through that. So if you have a right to the voice, use it. If you don't, go ahead and just use the content because it belonged to you, if you paid for it as the company. Right. So those are two ways in which you can take it to the next level of making sure that you're preserving the asset value, even if you don't want to preserve the YouTube channel or the podcast show.

Obviously not everybody in podcasting, in fact, I would say very few of us have such a big show that's nationally known or recognized. Right. And we may not have as big an organization around our podcasts and, you know, that's okay. I mean, very few people do. So we have a couple of examples, obviously with, you know, Charlie Kirk stuff and his show and some, you know, other people, there are some big name podcasts that this is a problem. But there's an awful lot more of the masses of us independent podcasters that might have this problem. And while, as Tracy said, we're not lawyers and we're not providing legal advice, we're not saying you have to put your podcast in your will or have a will about it. But all we're saying is have a plan, really, that's the big message is don't let the fate of your show be determined by others or by default. Because no one knows what you'd want, no one cares. And obviously if it's more of a situation where, you know, you're going to be on extended absence because you may be, you know, going to serve a prison sentence. And I know that may sound really far fetched to some of you, but literally we've seen it happen a couple times and there's a really good show there, despite whatever happened that may cause you to be incarcerated for a period of time. And actually we have some podcasts, come to think about it, that are for supporting people that have loved ones in prison. You know, it's interesting, all sorts of things that people don't think about, but have an opportunity to plan and either continue to receive value yourself if you're still among us in this world of living people, or, you know, make sure your legacy is preserved in some way, has some value and can either still serve others or help serve maybe and make some money for your loved ones or the organization you worked for, whatever it is, have a plan.

So think about it from this perspective. If you've got this plan in place, you're already investing value into your show, right? You're saying it's going to have value. That's a good mindset to be in when you're starting your show or you're continuing your show, being in this place, that it has value. Has value to my organization, it has value to my mindshare, it has value to my listeners out there. So that's the last piece that I want to leave with everyone, is make sure that you give yourself. If you're the one left with the podcast and you don't know what to do, give yourself some space. So the first thing is make sure you got that email address. Technically, make sure you have the ownership of it. Either take the time and if you don't want to pay for it, I totally get that. Transfer it to a free site. Or we have a pod fade site and we have a podfate plan. We don't publicize it that much, but we do for people who want to put it on. We call it hosting hiatus.

Yeah, very low cost. It's not free because there are costs to us as a company for hosting any show. But if you got a dormant podcast you just want to preserve, it's very low cost. I think it's like 15 bucks a month or 150 bucks a year or something like that. Free isn't always free. Just we've said that before, you know, if you go back and search and feed your rant about podcast hosting, you understand why free sites may not be in your long term best interest.

Well, two reasons. And I want to state them straight out here is that if you want those listeners, and so that is really the big thing here, is that shutting down it so immediately as a reaction to what happened doesn't honor the listeners, doesn't give you an opportunity to continue to nurture them. If you want to be able to transfer them and continue them and be able to get some redeemable value out of the show. Right. You have to keep it preserved in order to do that. So putting it though, on one of those free sites crams it with ads and number two, allows it to be scraped by AI, it's gone. And if you wanted to create that AI agent model or you wanted to do something where you're preserving a legend, you don't have the opportunity. I mean, it's already out in the world. And if you don't think that that happens, it's already happening to the living. We have lots of people who have thousands of videos and libraries of things and they're being knocked off on TikTok in a 30 second clip that citing their sage advice because they didn't preserve it properly, they didn't save it properly, they didn't keep it from the public domain. So thinking about that is really critically important to this process. But giving yourself space to make that decision is the most important thing. And so giving yourself, I'm going to say give yourself up to a year. So go pay for a year's worth of hosting. Just go out, pay for the year and give yourself breather to try to figure it out and then go and get an appraisal. Tom does them all the time, like, you're welcome to come to us, we're happy to give you an appraisal and tell you if there's any value in it. We want you to make sure that you're making the decisions for the right reasons. Where does the value lie? Is it only in the blogs at the end of the day, or is it in the listener base of the show? Could you be making money off of ads over the course of this year that you have it on hold? That might be possible too. And so that way you can be bringing in some income on the show while you're revamping it and figuring out what to do with it. There's a whole bunch of options that you have that you may not be ready to deal with today because you're reeling from the unexpected circumstance that put you in the driver's seat on this podcast. So give yourself the space and time to, to do it.

One other thing I would like to say is like, really a tip for you podcasters, especially any of you that have been podcasting maybe for a long time, or even if you haven't been out there for a long time, that you did everything yourself in the beginning, okay, if you really were a DIYer and you created your own show identity and you syndicated it yourself to Apple and Spotify and Iheart and a bunch of the different listening apps, when you do that yourself and when it was done maybe years ago in the past, when things were often done a little differently than they are today, with a new podcast, there can be a lot of information about your show that only you know and things maybe weren't done in the most efficient way, especially with red shrigging on different listening apps. And I this is on my mind because it literally just happened today with a show. They came to politize, move their show to our platform, redirected from the old host, publish a new episode, and it didn't go anywhere they expected it to because the show was on Apple. It was put there years ago. It was on Spotify, it was on iheart. But the way that it was done was so convoluted, and the people that did it did not preserve a log of that information. And so this is why I'm now, first of all, modern days, you launch a show, and especially if you do it with a company like Poditize, we syndicate your show to all those apps for you, and it's coming from one source, your RSS feed on Poditize. But that's not always the case with other shows. There's a lot of mess sometimes that occurred in the early days because you just wanted to get the show up quickly, use somebody do it for you, and they have that email address, like Tracy was saying, and you don't. That's one situation. And guess what? There are dead listings of shows on Apple and Spotify that no person who's in control of it or thinks are in control of the show, who actually owns the show and is in control of and can update, you need to have security answers to security questions you don't have. I mean, it can be a mess. So making sure that you leave a roadmap for your show for those that may be in charge of it in the future so that they actually can control it and do what you want. It's very important. I mean, trying to get Apple to give you access to a Apple ID for Apple Podcast Connect, which is how you have to control a show when somebody has died. I mean it is a long process. It will take you that year to get control of that and it's not going to be an easy thing for Apple support to help you with. So the more you can simplify these things and have clear login information for any place that's control in control of your show is going to make it possible for people to carry on your wishes. And it sounds overly complicated. And you know what it is, it's really complicated if you haven't done things the right way or it hasn't been done recently because there's a lot of older way things were done that they aren't done today. And it can be a mess to untangle that.

I think anyone who does legacy planning will tell you that digital mess people leave behind is incredibly difficult. It's like a hoarding.

It's very complicated. And you know, I think about this. We've been worrying about, you know, my parents as they're aging and trying to having a roadmap for where things are will make it so much easier for those of us that are left behind dealing with the fallout for whatever event takes place in life. Yes, but in a podcast, believe me, there's a serious tangled web of data and if you don't know where it is, you don't know where all the little points of data are, you're going to be hard pressed to be able to take advantage of the good value that may be left in that show.

So there are ways and like we pointed out the blogs, we can scrape things, we can do some things. So at least you're preserving the content, you're loved one's voice if that's what you need, we can make those things happen. So this again is a good reason to maybe consult someone, get someone who can really help you put that together for yourself and even maybe handle it for you so that you don't have to do that. I really hope, I know our title might have been a little provocative, but I really hope that it gets you to think that's what I wanted it to do was to jar you into thinking, not be, you know, not be a shock jock, but to jar you into thinking about some things that maybe you're not ready to face or that you haven't even considered facing. And if you are one of those companies who was investing in a show, why are you treating this like any less important contract? Why are you when you put in place, do you get bids? Do you, you know, if you do all of those things and yet you're not treating this podcast with that same level of project based thinking documentation as Tom pointed out, contracts if necessary. This is an asset being added to your business. Treat it with the reverence it deserves.

All right, let's leave it there. Thanks for listening everybody. We've got the blog post for this episode@podcasters united.org if you want to go there to get any of links to anything we talked about, any references, or to search on other related topics in our past episodes of Feed you'd brand. We'll be back next time with another episode. Until then, it's been Tom and Tracy on Feed your Brand.

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