Podcasting Your Brand: Tracy Hazzard from the Transform Your Impact Podcast with Alexa Henderson

Hi, welcome everyone. Back to Transform youm Impact. My name is Alexa Henderson. I'm so excited to have you with us today. We're speaking with entrepreneurs, creatives, thought leaders about how to create the most impact, live a fulfilling life and make money with your life's purpose. So today we have a true entrepreneur with us, Tracy Hazard. She's the founder and CFO of Potter Ties and Brand Casters. She's also an Ink Innovator, columnist and co host of several top ranked podcasts.

She's a multi awarded designer and product strategist who has worked with leading brands like Herman Miller and Martha Stewart. And her rich professional experience makes her a perfect person to consult with around what a client needs and also creating brands and branding with a purpose. So I'm so excited to have her on the show today and welcome Tracy.

Thank you so much for having me, Alexa. I am excited to be here. I love to talk transformation. I love to talk impact.

Awesome. Yeah, yeah, wonderful. So will you tell us about some of the impactful things that you're up to with your businesses?

Absolutely, yeah. You know, the thing is that I'm excited by everybody else's impact. Like that's how it's gotten started for me from the very beginning, you know, whether it's creating somebody else's product and bringing it to market. So I was what you called a ghost designer, which is kind of like a ghostwriter, but I'm designing products behind the scenes, behind and underneath somebody else's brand. And I, and I, you know, part of it's really great, like you're somebody else's problem. To get it to market, they got to do all the sales, Right. My job is to really bring it to life, but nobody wants to tell anyone that they didn't design their own products. So you have, you have a word of mouth problem, right? No one's referring you. So, you know, it's a really common problem we see happening in lots of industries. And that's what brought me to, you know, getting the word out and starting to think about yourself as the brand, yourself as the business. And that's where brandcasters and potitais was born. So it was born out of this world of I had a need to make sure that people knew who I was and what I did, and so do so many other people. And I wanted to find a community which I didn't know how to find. And so I put, I started casting my net. Right. I started casting out there and, and we started it with pot. With pot, podcasting. Because five years ago, that was a little easier. Video and live streaming wasn't as prevalent as it is today. Today we do it both ways. We do live streams and we do podcasts, and we do blogs. And like, the whole thing, that's what brandcasters is, is like the whole thing, starting from video all the way through to the blog, and even old school like SEO. I mean, it's not old school the way that we do it, but it's still there because it still runs the Google algorithm. Right? And so at the end of the day, if somebody's searching for you, you want them to find you, right? And so my goal is to make sure that I'm. That I'm fishing in the waters of people that are out there looking for me. So I'm not trapping them and hoping they stay and just say, oh, you're stuck in my email list now. No, I want them to want to be there. I want them to hang out with me because they've been looking for this. And so that's how we got started. And then we got people begging us to do it for them, and that's how we ended up in business three years ago, really. So I know they were like, can you just do this? Overwhelming for people. You know what it is? You know, I'm a. I'm a tech and how to girl, so it's not overwhelming to me. But I realized, I was like, oh, yeah, this is easy. You do this, this, this, and this. And people be like, but I have to learn all about that, that, that to do this. And I was like, oh, yeah, I already know how to do that. And so it, you know, it didn't occur to me until I went to go teach it that, wow, this is a lot more complicated. And so we actually have a course on how to podcast, and two people have gone through it successfully, and in the amount of time that it normally takes us to do a podcast, which is 30 days or less, and so it takes people a lot longer because there's so much underlying technical knowledge that you have to learn or good practices that you need to learn to do it. Well, it's not that you can't launch it. Lots of people do it, you know, kind of just like, oh, I threw up my podcast today. Like, it's. It's live. Great, Good. You should do that. Right? Don't, don't. I don't want you to stop doing that, because that's getting your message out. But if you want to make the most effective use of it, you've got to have these good practices. That's what your competitors are doing. So that's what we learned. And I said, well, let me just do it done for you so you don't ever have to worry about the stuff you shouldn't know about. You should be working in your impact. You should be working in the thing that you can do best. For me, that happens to be the how to.

That's so great. I love it. And so you really, when we spoke last time, you said that you really. Your goal is to make sure that people are the most successful that they can possibly be.

Yeah. You know, I think we. I attend a lot of entrepreneurial conferences and I'm all, you know, out there and I see what's going on and, you know, it's easier for me to have been successful than it is for someone coming in fresh to these communities and going, wow, that's great advice. I'd love to take it on, but I have infrastructure, I have support, I have business systems. I have all of that underneath me, which makes it easier for me to be successful because I now only need to implement the one thing, the one thing they told me about. Right. There's usually all this underlying stuff that they already have, core knowledge or core systems or experience in areas that you don't have. So when you go to implement that one thing that made them successful, it's not that it's untrue, it's that you didn't, you didn't apply all the other things that they failed to tell you. Just like I was saying before when I was like, oh, you have to know about blogging and SEO. Oh, you have to know about audio editing. Oh, you have to know about all these things already. I just assumed you did. Because I do. Right. And so doesn't every marketer or doesn't everybody? And that's not the case. And so when we dive deep into it, it's that infrastructure that actually gives you success.

Awesome. Awesome. Will you tell us about some of the kind of, like the ethics or the ethos that you've founded, Brandcasters and Potter Tires?

Yeah. You know, this is the thing. There's lots of people out there who are like, oh, let me just teach you how to do something, or they do it, they go, let me just teach them. And I really dislike that, because if you're teaching it because you did it once successfully, but you're not continuing to do it, you're missing out on shifting knowledge, things that are happening in the industry, things that are going on that you need to keep up with. And so your course that you do, you know, this is why I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of my own course, because every time I look at it, I'm like, it's out of date. You know, like, we gotta redo this video. And so we do it in a little more dynamic way. We actually use our podcast to supplement and support our course because there's new knowledge. And then the minute it gets, like, dangerously out of date, in other words, that this is no longer working, we redo the whole piece to the course. But we also, you know, like I said, the course is not our important part. Our important part is making sure that you get to podcasting or you get to live streaming, whatever it is you need to do. That's the part we want to get you to as successfully and fast as possible. And so whatever we can provide underneath that. So our goal here is to make our systems, our processes, your processes, so that we are acting like you, the brand and our. And it's transparent. It's absolutely like we're underneath it, and you're right on in front of it, and it makes you look good. Right. And that's where we want to keep ourselves as, you know, acting on your behalf, in your best interest. And it's not just about, oh, let's host a podcast or let's, you know, let's produce one. Right. It's not about that. It's about making you and your business successful. At the end of the day, if that means that I have to give you coaching tools and business tools and more marketing tools than I will.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So what is. What does it normally look like? Like, when somebody comes in and they want to make a podcast? I mean, what is the. What does the process look like with you? Because it sounds like you're pretty involved.

We're very involved. So when we onboard somebody who's never had a podcast before, sometimes we onboard people who've never had a website before. So as hard as that is to believe, like, oh, everybody has a website. It's not the case. Some people are transitioning out of fabulous careers in industry, and of course, they didn't have their own website, but now they want to go out and they want to, you know, bring their. Their message to the world of what they learned. There's also people who want to start social impact, and, you know, they have a great nonprofit that they want to start, and so this is their way to get that message out and get a tribe around them. And so we start sometimes all the way from website. And so what we do is we simply do that. We help draw out what is your mission, what are you looking for, what do you want to accomplish with that, and how can we attract that best both visually in copy, because what you write matters. And then taking all of that and putting just all the infrastructure and structure underneath it, like, you know, hey, you got to have a website that's safe, right? People can. People can not get hacked, right? How can we do that? How can we make sure that you're found on Google? How can we do all of these things that. That's all built under it. But more importantly, it's speed. Because what we find is that so often people think they know what their audience wants, but their audience is different than they imagine. So my very first podcast five years ago was in 3D printing, which is where you basically print a physical plastic product. I know it sounds insane to a lot of people, but that's what it is. We named the show wtff, which stands for what? The Fuse Filament Fabrication. It's not a swear, I promise. Although my mother thought so for about six months before she listened to the first episode and realized it wasn't. But fused filament fabrication is the geeky term for 3D printing. So we thought by making sure that we put that on there, that if you didn't know what 3D printing was and you didn't know that was a geeky term, you wouldn't join our show. And so it would be a more advanced show. Boy, were we wrong. Because people showed up at all levels of skills, and we found out we had beginners and advanced users, and we found we had to find a way to search. So we thought it would be a screener, and it didn't work, which is fine. What we found out was that the product and the service that we wanted to sell wasn't wanted. But our information was so valuable. And so what we provided from perspective and innovation was something new, and that's what they wanted. And so that's how we developed then the next level of what we did. And we actually created a complete informational website for that. And so it's just dependent on having that conversation. The sooner you can get that started, the sooner you can verify what I call your hypothesis brand. The idea that you have that this is my audience and this is who's going to be attracted to me, because you may be very wrong. And once you get them talking to you and communicating and you find out what they really want. You go, oh, I can do that. Of course. That's why they're attracted to me. What you'll find is there's a lot more synergy with who you are authentically than you imagined. And that is because you're out there doing this. You're speaking, you're being authentically. You, you're talking ad, you know, you're talking ad hoc. You're just off the cuff saying things that you believe and understand and have experience in and telling stories. And people look at that and they go, oh, that's something I would like, I'd like to know more. And they dive deeper into it. And now they engage with you. And so once we find that we can refine a brand, right? You can always change your website colors, you can change your logo. Nobody's gonna care when they come along with you. Potatoes. Our brand has been through three brand changes and most of our clients didn't even notice. I mean, we actually had clients the whole time and they didn't even notice. They're like, oh, it's called something different now. Yeah.

So because they didn't you is what you're saying, basically.

Exactly. And we didn't want to call it that because it's not what our long term business goals. It doesn't fit our business goals. Right. We have goals to be plugins for other sites and, and for other marketers and other things like that. So be service providers for them. So it needs to have a little more corporate feel because we don't want to compete against them. So that's why we developed it and shifted it into what it is today. You know, I'd love to call it Tom Tracy Hazard, but, you know, nobody cares. And if nobody cares about me, they care about themselves and their businesses. So that's what we, you know, what we've learned very quickly into, you know, into this journey of going through and transforming people's podcasts year after year after year.

So exciting. So can you tell us a couple like amazing success stories? Like maybe people that came in that were just lost and just didn't. They needed your support and then you coached them into the success.

Yeah. So what we've really found is that there, there are three kinds of things that, that we do. And so a lot of people will come in and they've been struggling, Right. They've been struggling to get their message out. And whether it is a, you know, we get a of, I'm going to call them coaches, gurus, experts, like thought leaders. Like all in that world. And it was. It's always a. I'm going to call it an enrolling conversation for them, right? It's always about promotion. So when we switch them up and we start to go content first, it's a service situation. And service is selling. It's just different type of selling. It's covert selling. And it's not like covert, like it's sneaky. It's just. It's underneath the whole thing. And so when we switch them up to this model of service first and they get out of the mode of I'm going to do a pitch at the end of every single one of my shows and I'm going to send you to a legion. I'm going to send you to this instead. We do things like send them to a quiz so that they can find out where they are, and then how can I help you from there? Send them back to our podcast, our blog posts, our videos, libraries, because there's so much more in deep information. There's people start qualifying themselves and the enrollment conversations become really easy. So that's the main way. And I'd out someone, but I don't want to out them. So in that particular world. But I have some great stories about doctors, for instance. So we have a couple of doctors on our platform, quite a few actually, chiropractors, dentists, like all kinds of areas of expertise. And one of them, his name is Dr. Kevin Peck, and he has a great show. And it is he. It's called Expect Miracles. And he was joined, he was starting a new practice, so he was going into New Jersey and buying out an existing chiropractic practice. And he had the problem of shifting all of the people who were practice who were with the original doctor who had been with her for, I don't know, 50 years. I think she'd had that practice 40 or 50 years, so quite a long time. So they were very devoted to her. So, like, how is he going to get them interested in him? He's young, he's just starting his practice, and how is he going to get him to stay? How was he also going to attract new patients? And so he was starting to think about that. And he happened to be out here in California, where we are as an intern, and we met him and we started talking with him and he was like, you know, I think this might be something worth doing. And I looked at him and I said, you know, we've never done something where you're trying to attract local patients because podcasting is international. Right. You never know who's listening around the world. But let's see if we can do this with you. And we'll, you know, we'll do our best to try and give you a local flair to it. And so what happened was, is that it worked in and made his system of getting to know his patients really easy. So they would come in and he'd say, oh, you're a golfer. You know, I just did this episode with this guy who really changed his golf game through what we. Through chiropractic. He wasn't my patient, but he transformed because he practices a very specific type of chiropractic. So he transformed his game from. From this. Maybe you'd be interested in listening to it. That guy would book an appointment the next week, right. Like, so it was always going on like that he would get patience because off of Google, Google rewards your blog post that it's searching through and finding the information. It knows where you are because your website is tagged for the locality. So every time someone searches in their region, and so say, I'm looking for a chiropractor, even if I didn't type New Jersey, Google knows that I am in New Jersey. And it would look for one there. And so he was getting. Because he was producing content that was new rather than having a static website that normal doctors have, his was getting pushed up to the top of the list. And he was showing up on the first page of Google and people were clicking it. They were listening to the podcast and then coming in and saying, I'm ready to go. There was no enrollment conversations. And so that's how it can really work for you, no matter whether you're doing it from a doctor's perspective and having a local practice or you have, you know, an international coaching program. So, you know, it can work like that as well. And then the third one that we do is a lot of experts that are experts in niches like real estate and investments and all of those things. And we have to come up with really unusual and interesting ways because sometimes they're unregulated industries. So we have to come up with ways by which they can have conversations, they can grow their audience, they can keep their list from having high attrition rates, which is where people get drop off your list because they're not. You're not providing them enough value right over time. And so how can they continue to provide them value exposure? And a lot of times with that, we do what we call an interview strategy, where we find people in industries that would be of interest. So whether it's you're in the real estate business and now I want to interview what investors are looking for, or maybe you might be in an industry where you're in finance and you really want to interview people who are providing tools to improve your financial management to, you know, that might be. Might be authors, it might be all of that. But what you're doing is you're transferring authority back and forth between your guest and you. So if they have a higher authority than you, it's coming back to you. And their audience is now looking at you as an authority and someone who might provide them more information. And it's going the other way as well. When they share you out now they're exposing you to their audience. So you've got it going both ways.

Awesome. So what I'm hearing is a lot of value. Like instead of like the general sales model. Right. It's adding more value. And it's based on relationships and coaching and mentoring.

Yeah, it's always about service. Like, if we think about that first.

Is that my content, my information, the exposure I'm bringing you is always in service of my listener. So I always imagine who she or he is. And I'm thinking about that in my head as I'm. As I'm speaking. Right. So I'm imagining your audience right now, what they're looking for and how I can pull a story, come up with things that might add value to their lives. And when I'm doing that, I'm in the moment. I'm not selling. But what's happening is when that resonates with them, and it resonates because it's in their ear. Right. And it resonates at a deeper level of vibration. And when that happens, then I am attracting them back into me for further information. So they're saying, she sounds like a source for something. Let me check her out further. And if you think that you can push out into people, have it be effective. Yeah, it does work. But you have to spend more and more money pushing out to a bigger audience to have that have a return on investment. But why not be at that place when somebody is in pain at 2 in the morning and they're searching for a way to help their child overcome autism and they're looking for tools and anything that information people have been through, what they're going through and how can I make this I want to. Why wouldn't you want to be in that place? That's what you're there for, right? To create your impact. Is to touch the people who need you most. So you got to be where they are.

What would you say? You know, if you could distill it down, what would you say? That the, like, one thing that has supported you to make the biggest impact has been in your experience.

So, you know, this is my. I think it's my gift as a designer, it's my gift as a strategist.

It's definitely the thing that has separated and made the products that we've designed and developed on market and we've done about a billion dollars for our clients in products. Yeah. So actually it's probably way more than that. I stopped counting about three years ago. And so, you know, it's. It's a lot of what people don't realize is we hone in really quickly on the one thing, the thing that is going to be the most differentiated about a product, but it's not. People get into their own, like, bubble of it and they say, oh yeah, I offer this and I'm special and I'm the only one in the world. Well, the reality is as if, if who's ever going to buy it from you doesn't see that no one's going to transact. So it must actually be consumer focused. It must be what they can obviously see. And for me, early on, this is why it got. It got easy for me because on a shelf in Walmart or Target or Costco, right. People are driving by fast. So before the Internet and now we scroll really fast, right? If you are going to catch their eye with innovation, it better be obvious and it better be what they're looking for. So whether it's what they're searching for, what they're visually looking for, all of those things have to tie together. But finding that differentiator that matters to them most, that's what that's honing that in is the secret.

Awesome. Awesome. Will you tell us also about. You've got a free gift for.

I do. So I write for Inc. Magazine. I write on innovation and product design. And I've been doing that for. It's my fourth year. This is my fourth year. So, yeah. So I've been doing that for quite some time. And over time I would get these horrendous pitches from people. And so. And so I was like, why would anybody write about you? Like, this is so awful. Right? You know, it was like sometimes it would be like, I'll pay you to write about me. And I'd be like, well, that's against all the rules. This can't happen. And you may not realize that, but it doesn't. It's not okay. And then, and then others, it would just be these horrendous pitches. Like, you've never read my column, so you should know that I can't. I would never write about this. This is not in my, it is not even in my purview. So why would I write about it? So, and so I decided to write a. It was like a little flyer I did. It was like a little one pager originally. It's now like four or five pages, I think. And so it basically just outlines how you should approach and pitch the media. So these are publicity secrets. Right. And it's different today than it used to be. And so it dives into. What's the difference? How do you find a columnist who's a columnist? Because a lot of our writers today are all freelancers. We all have day jobs that are completely different than our writing. It's not. I don't write for a career. Inc doesn't pay me to go to interview people. It doesn't work like that. Yeah, so I mean, they pay me for my articles, but only if they get enough views. So it has to be able to be pushed out. So you have to be someone of value. So I also talk about in there exactly how I research someone to decide if I should write about them.

Thanks so much for joining today. Please stay tuned. We've got tons more. Business owners, entrepreneurs, creatives, thought leaders who are all unpacking the keys to success, to fulfillment, and to making money. Can't wait to give more secrets away. We'll see you tomorrow.