In this episode of the Business Blast Podcast, host Tyler Wagner interviews Madeline Johnson, a business, marketing, and media strategist who works with fashion, fitness, health, and wellness brands. Madeline shares a formative story from 2010 when she tried to launch a healthy snack cart inside a Manhattan WeWork space, learning the critical importance of testing market assumptions about foot traffic. She emphasizes that owned publishing—using a brand’s own website, blog, and social channels—outperforms chasing traditional vanity media for building awareness. She advises entrepreneurs to develop a believable, approachable brand voice through daily practice, such as recording and reviewing videos, and to stay current with industry trends by reviewing annual forecasts. Madeline also reflects on personal growth, recommending peace of mind as the core of happiness, and cites Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (attitude choice) and Ray Dalio’s Principles (expanding goals) as transformative books. She shares three favorite quotes that reinforce presence, resilience, and commitment. Finally, she provides her online platforms—mj.works, Undisputed Origin, and Instagram @MadelineMarieJohnson—for listeners to connect with her services.
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All right, cool. So yeah, very nice to meet you. And just to make sure, so is— am I pronouncing your name right? Madeline?
Yes, you are.
Okay, Madeline. And where are you located?
Right now I'm in Boca, but I go back and forth from Boca to New York.
Oh, nice.
Great. It's great to meet you too, Tyler Wagner.
Yeah, and I actually, I live down in Miami.
No way!
Yeah, so Boca is like, what, 45 minutes about?
Exactly, exactly. Wow, that's great to hear.
Well, if you're ever down in Miami, we can grab coffee sometime.
I would love it. Awesome.
I would love it. Well, very cool. Thanks for coming on the show, and let me just actually look at your introduction to make sure I don't have any questions.
Sure. Cool.
Okay, yeah, sometimes people put like words I've never seen before in there.
So hopefully you got it.
So yeah, perfect. If you are ready, we can jump right in.
Absolutely. Awesome.
All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Madeline Johnson with us. She is a business marketing and media strategist specializing in fashion, fitness, health, and wellness. And loves working with people making products or services that make you look and feel great. So welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you, Tyler. It's great to be here.
Of course. Grateful to have you on. So the first one I got for you is what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
Sure, sure. I'm going to take you back to 2010, and I was working out of a WeWork space. It was one of the first WeWork spaces in Manhattan across from the Empire State Building. And I was running my consulting business out of a 5x5 glass box. And I had an idea one day when I noticed that everybody was eating pretty bad junk food and staying there very late, a lot of startups, a lot of people reinventing themselves. And I thought, why don't we have really close by access to healthy food? And is there a possibility to build something within this WeWork if I collaborated with Adam and Miguel and offer, you know, fresh green juices, lettuce wraps, things that, you know, they'd be able to eat and, you know, feel probably more energized and better about themselves as they were working 14 to 20 hours a day out of these boxes. So I approached Adam, at that time he was very approachable, you know, I mean, it was only his first business out of his Brooklyn space. And I said, I would love to do a test and build an organic cafe within that WeWork space. And he looked at me and immediately broke out his calculator on his iPhone and said, "Well, we were thinking the same idea." And, you know, I said, "Well, this place is all about coworking and collaboration, so I would love to, you know, give it a test here with you." And he immediately put me in touch with Ariel Tiger, who was the CFO. And we started to work on, you know, the marketing plan and the business, you know, and what we'd need for startup and sales projections. And one of the things that I thought about was how many people are actually in this building, you know, as we were developing sales projections, because we wanted to get an idea of the size of the market, you know, how much we would need to stock up in terms of food and healthier snacks, etc. And, you know, we started off with a really big boom and really high sales projections based on the fact that there were 500 desks in this building. In the building. Now the trick was, and we started with sales on the very first day, but we weren't meeting the sales projections. And I couldn't understand why until I took a walk through all 6 floors in the building. And then it was, I realized that not everybody was actually using their space every day. So my critical assumption that 500 people showed up in that building every single day was then, you know, absolutely wrong. About half the people showed up every single day. So that really threw off our sales projections. Right. And so that had me thinking about critical assumptions in general. And as we develop businesses and we build things, what we believe to be true may not necessarily be the case until we see it and experience it and test it with our own eyes. If I had done a walkthrough maybe for the first week before we opened up the snack cart or while we were doing the sales projections, I would add a much better idea of what I could expect in terms of foot traffic every day. So that is the valuable lesson, to be very careful about what you assume to be true before you start to build something.
Absolutely. That's so cool too. I used to have a WeWork office as well, and for me, I just, I personally like to work from home better, so that's why it didn't last. But I do love the space. So it's just a cool story to even hear, like, back when it first started, like, you were a part of that. So that's really cool.
Yeah, right? And when Adam was actually accessible, it was fantastic because I truly think they're a genius, you know? But it's true because I work with so many different, you know, people who are starting some incredible things, but they assume that they have this market and they assume it's a certain size and then are gravely disappointed when they're not, you know, making money the moment they get out of the gate and the moment they launch. And that's something you have to be very careful about.
So the next one I got for you is, what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
Sure, sure. So I help businesses of all sides navigate their presence on the web and on social media. You know, I just recently finished a project with Dr. Adam Pearlman of Duke University. He's a doctor of functional medicine, and I finished just I just finished a project with a beauty product company from Korea that's making skincare masks, right? And what I'm finding is that many people still believe that vanity media, meaning the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Vogue, right? Are all so important to growing their business, being recognized by this media. And what they don't truly appreciate or understand the value of is that these amazing tools that we have from our websites to blogs, to LinkedIn, to Twitter, to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest are all publishing tools that when used properly are actually going to gain them more brand awareness than any interview will ever do. Sure, interviews are great and traditional media still has its place, but when it comes to it, your responsibility as a brand, as a startup, as somebody who's trying to build a presence on the web is to publish valuable, helpful, useful information on a daily, or if you can't do that, on a weekly basis that will attract people to you and help you build a community. And for some reason, they are— the clients that I speak to don't get that. They want the shortcut. They think that an interview in the Wall Street Journal is going to get them noticed. And those journalists and reporters are struggling for attention just as much as they would be on their own publishing platforms. So that would be the valuable piece of information. Just please, you know, you've got access to so many tools. You're a publisher now, no matter what you're making, do it. Yeah, work.
Could not agree more. I'm a huge Gary Vaynerchuk fan. So you're speaking my language. So next one, I got it, and it could very well tie in. Well, definitely does. But what's your best piece of just overall business advice and not necessarily industry specific?
Sure. So as I meet with clients, right, and explain to them that, yes, PR is very important, but a part of PR now really is about developing your own presence and publishing. You have to work on your brand's voice, right? Whether you're a person who is a consultant or a physician or a specialist of some sort, or you're a brand, you have to have a voice that's believable, that is approachable, that's helpful. And you have to sound like you're on top of your game because your business is completely exposed now, right? Whether you're doing B2B marketing or right to the client or consumer. So unfortunately, for some reason, people find it to be really awkward to get out there and start writing and videoing themselves, you know, talking about their expertise. And what I would say to them is The best thing you can do is practice. And I like with Dr. Adam Pearlman, I said, before we go and shoot 28 videos, right, for your website, I want you to get on your iPhone every day and video yourself and then critique and watch yourself and get those messages tight. Right. And that really helped him and develop his brand voice the way he actually that speaks to, you know, everybody on the web. So I think that developing the voice is very important. And the second piece of advice I would be is please don't operate in a bubble. Be aware of the changes happening in your industry. Stay on top of trends. Every year around December, I start to look at what trends are forecasted in each industry to know what's ahead. And business owners should do the same.
And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
Okay, so it would be two pieces of advice. Advice. So the first would be you're so much more powerful than you know. And the second would be to stop worrying so much about what might happen and focus on being in the present moment. Mm-hmm.
And then the next one is a little bit different than the others. It is, in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
So I recently found this out. You know, I have a separate blog and it's a blog about self-awareness and emotional intelligence. And I realized that peace of mind is happiness, and it has to be guarded with your life. And I think it was Brian Tracy who had some type of quote about, you know, how important peace of mind is and should be your number one goal. Because we try to control so many things that we can't, and peace of mind is something you can control. You get to decide what's going to upset you today, and luckily it's one of the easiest things you can learn to do, and nobody can take peace of mind away from you.
And then what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
Sure. So I have, you know, I have a book that I always go back to and it's Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, right? It's a chronicle of experiences in Nazi concentration camps. And it's really about the fact that anything that happens to you, right? Anything challenging, it's your attitude that you get to choose in any given set of circumstances. And when you can keep your attitude in a bright place, you already own your position in life. But right now I am reading Ray Dalio's Principles and I'm learning so much from him. And I think one of the things that I would love to share is that when you're setting goals, you know, people tend to keep their goals kind of small, but that's only because you're creating goals from what you know at the moment. And as you learn new things, you will grow and your goals should become bigger. So that's a takeaway from Ray Dalio's book, which I highly recommend.
Oh yeah, both books that you mentioned are incredible.
Yeah.
And then what is your favorite quote and why?
So I have 3 quotes and they're very short quotes. The first one is "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass. And it just reminds me to be in the present moment. The second one is "It's like this." And that's similar to the quote, "This too shall pass." And I heard it on Tara Brach's podcast. And the third is, if you can, you must. And that came from my Bikram hot yoga instructor, Jill. And it was in the middle of a pose that I just so didn't want to do. She just said, if you can, you must. And I knew she was talking to me.
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Tara Brach. I actually have not listened to her podcast, but I read her book years ago, Radical Acceptance.
Amazing book. Amazing book. Yeah.
So yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Very insightful episode. The last one I got for you is where can our audience best find you online?
Sure, sure. Um, I'm sorry, okay, did you just ask me where people could find me? Yes, I couldn't hear you. Okay, so I have two websites. One is mj.works, and the other— and that's where you can find out what about what I'm working on and how I can help consult you. And the second is Undisputed Origin, and, uh, that's life advice from brilliant minds, everything that I'm learning. And then I'm also on Instagram at Madeline Marie Johnson.
Perfect. Thanks again for coming on.
Thank you, Tyler Wagner Wagner. I appreciate it. I hope you have a great day. The podcast you just heard was made using Anchor. Ever thought about making your own podcast? Anchor makes it really easy for anyone to get started. It's a one-stop shop for recording, hosting, and distributing podcasts. Best of all, it's 100% free. Sign up now at anchor.fm/new. That's anchor.fm/new to get started.
