Episodes
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The Mixergy podcast was one of the first tech business podcasts I followed. And I love how Andrew Warner pushes below the surface for a deeper understanding of how startups work and doesn't accept pat answers. In this conversation with Andrew Warner, we returned to the startup days at CreativeLive.
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Podcast: Mixergy
Episode: The untold story behind CreativeLive
Website: https://mixergy.com/ -
In my first two decades as a small business owner, I couldn't imagine selling my business. And I think, like a lot of small business owners, I felt a small touch of moral superiority over business owners who did sell. In this conversation with Christine Trumbull on her valuable Mastering Your Exit Strategy podcast I had an opportunity to dig into the mind-shift and freedom that I've experienced in my career as I moved from a small business owner into truly viewing myself as an entrepreneur, and moreso now as a serial-entrepreneur.âSo my first company I started was my baby, it was the thing that I put all my energy into, it was built around me, I was an integral part. And then when I started hiring employees, I was looking for people who were clones of me. And I couldn't find clones of me, I couldn't find people who would care about the business as much as I did. And over a 20-year period, I slowly learned that good employees don't necessarily see the world the way an owner does. And I started to see that my attachment to the business might actually be getting in my own way.âIn a lot of ways, my IT company, which was a small little thing, could grow only maybe like 1x or 2x bigger than me because I was attached to every single facet of it. It was my life.ââ...And I think that's what started me on my path towards understanding that a business's needs and my personal needs are not the same. The more that my Venn diagram showed me and my business overlapped, the less freedom in life I had. And the business was never really built to scale because it was always built around me.â
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Podcast: Mastering Your Exit Strategy
Episode: Craig Swanson - Conversation with a Serial Entrepreneur
Website: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mastering-your-exit-strategy/id1606940274 -
Missing episodes?
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I love talking about sales. I was fortunate to be exposed early in my career to what professional sales looks like. David Shriner-Cahn invited me to discuss my early days in selling IT services on his Smashing the Plateau podcast.âMy view of sales was framed by professionals. I was trained with a group of professionals who built a lot of trust with their clients. And for me, one of the definitions of a professional in sales is someone for whom every transaction increases trust in the next transaction. âEvery relationship I can move forwardâif I am doing it correctlyâI am making the next one easier because I'm building trust at every phase. It's not my job to make a client's decision for them, and it's not my job to trick them into that decision. At every step along the way, if I can work in a way that helps them get what they say they want, it is going to increase trust next time.âMy job is to try to uncover an opportunity. To find if there's a need, if we can help a client solve something, and if they see a problem we can solve. My job is not to convince them past their objections but to help them make a decision, yes or no, about whether this is the right move for them.âNow, I do that with the mindset that I need to be able to close sales and move forward. I think many consultants spend a lot of time discussing potential opportunities but never getting to a clear yes or no because they're so afraid of getting a no. If I'm afraid that someone will say no, I never ask if I can get to a yes.âI got to a place where it was more important to be clear in my relationships. Not to waste my time and not to waste the time of my prospective client. Rather, Iâd work to get to a clear yes or no as early in the process as possible. And then start the consulting relationship if there is a relationship to start.â
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Podcast: Smashing the Plateau
Episode: How to Sell Your Expertise as a Consultant Featuring Craig Swanson
Website: https://smashingtheplateau.com -
Diane Helbig had me on as a guest for her Accelerate Your Business Growth podcast for a discussion around the challenges small business owners face growing a small business that revolves around themselves.âI started my small business in 1988 when I was 18. I dropped out of my first year of college and started a small business in the IT space, helping design agencies with computers. And I spent 20+ years in that business growing through different phases.âI made it above $250,000 in annual revenue by the year 2000, and after that, I bumped around that size for a long time. Even while I was saying I wanted more and saying I wanted to grow, I settled into this plateau, and was stuck there for years.âI was standing my own way. And it wasnât until I started to make shifts in my own mindset that the tactics that Iâd studied intellectually started to actually work.â
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Podcast: Accelerate Your Business Growth
Episode: Step Back From Your Businesses
Website: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/accelerate-your-business-growth/id385108650 -
David Ralph had me on as a guest for his Join Up Dots podcast for a free-ranging discussion about entrepreneurship and finding balance and peace in life.âI am perpetually in the space that I love, which is trying to figure out how to take a business that is just on the cusp of figuring out product-market fit and getting it up to stability, getting it to grow, and building a team... These days I am living my dream of working with entrepreneurs and building in this space where I'm helping create stability, create something that works, and then mentoring a team to run it. Once it's built, I get to step back and watch it work.â
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Podcast: Join Up Dots
Episode: How To Build Life And Business Balance
Website: https://joinupdots.com/ -
Sue Bryce and I are guests on John Warrillowâs Built to Sell podcast! Iâve been a fan of Johnâs for years, and two of his business books Built to Sell, and The Automatic Customer have been at the top of my entrepreneurial recommendation list for years.Itâs an entrepreneurial bucket-list moment to have been a guest on his show.This episode is a deep dive into everything we learned during a failed due diligence process for a possible acquisition of Sue Bryce Education in 2019, and then the steps we took to rebuild the SBE business using everything we learned in that process.About one hour into the interview John asks for the specific steps we took to rebuild the business to make it something we could successfully sell. Here are the four key takeaways from that part: Assign a CEO: We needed to align our management team so instead of four partners hashing out every idea, we assigned one partner, Aaron, the responsibility of being the CEO and day-to-day operator of the business No New Projects: We agree to get good at saying no. We realized we had wandered off into a variety of pet projects which sucked cash and attention out of the core business. Instead, we decided to say no to all new ideas and focus on the core business. Professionalize sales and marketing: We made some key hires in the areas of sales and marketing and built a sales process that no longer required Sueâs involvement Empower a new voice: We launched a new podcast featuring success stories of photographers in their community. Sue would have been the natural choice to host the show, but we knew that would undermine the ability to sell the company so we invited one of Sue's most-trusted protege Nikki Closser to be the new voice of SBE.The changes worked. Two years after turning down a reduced initial offer, the Sue Bryce partners completed a successful acquisition of Sue Bryce Education by Emerald in 2021.
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Podcast: Built to Sell Radio with John Warrillow
Episode: Sue Bryce & Craig Swanson - The 8-Figure Expert
Website: https://builttosell.com/radio/ -
I really enjoyed talking with Abby Glassenberg on the Craft Industry Alliance podcast about creating digital products and teaching online courses. Abby was an instructor at CreativeLive where she taught a workshop on Email Marketing for Crafters, and it was great going back to the days of CreativeLive with someone who had the personal experience teaching on that stage.âThe idea behind a CreativeLive workshop was that the people who were watching remotely should feel the cues as if they were in the room. They should feel the emotion in the room, they should feel what's going on. And that is not a natural thing for a lot of online Edtech to focus on.âA lot of education platforms focus on the information. They think if I'm pointing my camera at someone who has the right information, then that is my job. And for me, especially because I've worked with artists and creatives my entire career, most of the learning for me is not about the information, it is about the context. Especially the emotional context around the information.âBecause anything that someone wants to know, wants to learn, informationally, can probably be had for free with a properly worded Google search. There's really nothing we've ever created or sold that's not available for free in text form. But we, as humans, learn from watching others. We learn from stories and connection with people.âAnd so for me, CreativeLive was built around the audience first and then created a space for the instructors. Where most learning platforms put the instructor on a pedestal.â
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Podcast: Craft Industry Alliance
Episode: Episode #212: Craig Swanson
Website: https://craftindustryalliance.org/podcast/ -
Britney Gardnerâs podcast, The Know Like & Trust Show, is a podcast that I can find myself listening to for hours. She's smart, grounded, and has genuine conversations that go deep into the world of personal branding â from both the business side of tactics and marketing, as well as the personal side of meaning, purpose, and ultimately making business decisions that support building the life a person values.I could pull favorite quotes from almost any part of our recent conversation, but I love this section about ten minutes in that gets into the nitty-gritty side of the brand consequences we face when scaling a big personal brand...âI am not a brand builder. I am a company builder. But I partner with people who have put the work in to really establish a significant personal brand around themselves and who attracted a large social following. And I work with them to create a scalable model around their business, and to take what they've started and build something significantly bigger than either they think they could do by themselves or necessarily want to do alone.âI tend to work with people that are mission-driven in some fashion that, and have a larger purpose beyond just making money or selling units. And one of the things I've learned to do very early, often before we even become partners or start working together, is we have a deep conversation about brand and values. âWhat I ask, is to go through their brand and identify what is non-negotiable? And what is everything else? On the non-negotiable side, we have core values, morals, or really deep-seated, ethical beliefs. And then in the everything else category, we have opinions, aesthetics, tactics, wording, and all sorts of details.âAnd one of the things that I'm really trying to kind of gauge with them is how much control they're willing to seed to the market and to the rest of the world the things that are outside of the non-negotiable side of the brand? How willing they are to allow us to learn from the market, and willing to let the audience educate us as to what is important, rather than us making the assumptions that we know what they, the audience, really value.âThanks for a great conversation Britney!
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Podcast: The Know Like & Trust Show with Britney Gardner
Episode: How to Scale a Personal Brand
Website: https://britneygardner.com/blog -
Big thank you to Jim Huffman for inviting me on as a guest on his âIf I Was Starting Todayâ podcast. I've been invited on a few podcasts lately, but this entrepreneurial conversation with Jim has been my favorite yet!
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Podcast: If I Was Starting Today
Episode: Lessons From Starting 10 Startups with Craig Swanson
Website: http://jimwhuffman.com/ -
âWhen a lot of small business owners like me would draw a Venn diagram of themselves â if they were to draw a circle representing themselves and a circle representing their business â the two circles would be so overlapped as to appear as to only be one.âAnd, especially in the first decade, I desperately told people I wanted to somehow build a business that could be separate from me, but everything I did put that, put that to a lie. I mean, I clearly did not want the business to separate from me in any fashion whatsoever. Any personal, slight, any fight against the business was a personal slight.âAny reward for the business was a personal reward. My identity was so wrapped up in that, that I couldn't separate myself. My business was my identity.âConversation with Adam Hommey at Business Creators Radio Show about ego, identity, and small business mindset. (Original air date: January 27, 2022)
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Podcast: Business Creators Radio Show
Episode: Stepping Back From Your Businesses and Removing Ego, With Craig Swanson
Website: https://www.businesscreatorsradioshow.com -
âI am definitely a creator. I need to create, I need to be inventing things. And if I only have one company, a single company cannot consume the amount of creation that I need in my life. And so for me, having side businesses is a way of protecting my core business from being changed constantly because of my needs as an owner.âAnd honestly, when, when I'm coaching small business owners in the EO Accelerator program, one of the biggest challenges I see are owners forcing their business to take their total creative output even when that business doesn't need it. What that business really needs is to be stabilized, have a simple product and structure that can grow instead.âBusiness owners are constantly trying to shove all of themselves into a single entity. And, especially if they are a creator type, that one entity generally should not receive all of their creative capacity.âHuge thanks to Dan Weedin and Michelle Bomberger for inviting me be part of the Shrimp Tank podcast. It was a great experience, talking about what it takes to grow digital product businesses, as well as coaching fellow business owners in the EO Accelerator program. (Original air date: January 7, 2022)
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Podcast: The Shrimp Tank Podcast Seattle
Episode: The Future of Digital Business
Website: https://shrimptankpodcast.com/seattle/ -
Building Sue Bryce Education with Sue, George, and Aaron has been one of the most prolific, creative, and professional experiences of my life.I remember sitting exhausted with Sue in Seattle in April 2012, the day after her first workshop at CreativeLive. That weekend changed everything and jump-started a transformational decade of creating and building online learning platforms with Sue.Something is fitting and magical that we celebrated our first decade of creation together by having Sue Bryce Education acquired by Emerald, which owns the WPPI conference. WPPI is where we met in person the first time â and when I met George, he was running WPPI.I canât wait to see what is next on this journey!
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Podcast: The Portrait System Podcast
Episode: Special Announcement From Sue Bryce and the Founders
Website: https://suebryceeducation.com/podcast/ -
âI have spent my career being the left brain support for right brain professionals. I was the technical support, the business support, the structural support. I was building structural foundations that allow creative professionals to flourish.âSo most of my career was spent with graphic designers at agencies, videographers, and photographers. In the early days when technology was first coming in, I taught people the first version of Photoshop and dealt with all the issues around that.âBut it's always been from the standpoint of helping create structural foundations that allow creative professionals to lead a sustainable life. For me, my passion comes from allowing people to unlock a sustainable life around their passion.âI loved this conversation with Jed Taufer about building Sue Bryce Education and the magic of what's possible in online learning communities. This conversation was recorded at The Portrait Masters inaugural Conference in Indian Wells, California, in September 2017. (Original air date: February 4, 2018)
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Podcast: This Conversation with Jed Taufer
Episode: Craig Swanson - The Outsider
Website: conversation.whcc.fm -
âI think there is something incredibly powerful about taking action. Claiming something that I want for myself, claiming something I want to learn, claiming something I want to create â and then taking action towards that thing. And discovering the result of that step. And doing that repeatedly over time. It almost doesn't matter what we reach for because the act of moving towards what we want is transformative in and of itself.âThat's probably the biggest thing I learned from CreativeLive. That results are not as important as all the activities we put into our lives to move towards those results.âBecause life is not lived in the results. Life is lived in the actions and the pursuit.âThis was from a conversation with Tara Gentile (now Tara McMullin) for the first episode of her Power. Profit. Pursuit. podcast (now the What Works podcast). So much has changed in the six years ago since we talked in the CreativeLive podcast recording room, surrounded by an amazing sound dampening Book Mural by Mike Oncley. There were many quotes I wanted to pull out from that conversation, but this one resonates with me for the coming decade. It is the actions we take in pursuing our dreams that mean more to our lives than the dreams themselves.
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Podcast: What Works with Tara McMullin
Episode: Profit Power Pursuit: CreativeLive Co-Founders
Website: https://explorewhatworks.com/whatworks/ -
â10 years from now, there's going to be a new generation of leaders and innovators in the world that are going to share in their common story a moment in time at this placeâCreativeLiveâwatching something that happened here. Now that doesn't mean that CreativeLive will be around ten years from now. What happens with CreativeLive in 10 years? That's for us to execute well on or execute poorly on. âBut there is a change that is happening in the world based on the people who are watching us and what they are doing with their own lives. And for me, that's what this is all about.ââŠNothing that we have done would be possible without the support of everybody out there, especially those supporting us in the early days. Because it is the audience, the community, that supported us early on that makes everything we're doing now possible.âAnd for me, I feel so incredibly fortunate every time I come to work. We are able to attract really great instructors. We're able to attract some of the best staff in the world doing this. And none of that's possible without the audience, without you guys that are out there supporting us, tuning in, talking back, arguing, sometimes poking us when you don't like what we're doing.âYou are the people that make CreativeLive exist, and I never forget that for a moment. âŠWhen we started, it was a $25 microphone, and nobody had any reason to pay any attention to us all. And the only reason instructors paid attention to us is that the size of our audience became significant enough, and people spoke on our behalf strongly enough that other people started to listen.âSo especially for those of you who've been watching. You know, for over three years or sometimes longer back. Thank you. That sense of community is something that is felt. Whenever people come to participate, they say that they were in their homes a lot of the time and they felt like part of the family.ââŠWe see the difference in people's lives. We see people creating businesses that didn't exist previously. We see people taking risks. We see people telling the story of what they're doing, and it's not us doing that work. They're doing the work in their own life. Sometimes we're doing nothing more than giving them an excuse.âI feel humble about the audience. For me, it's a responsibility. You know, there are people that have given us the amount of attention they've given us, and it's our responsibility to live up to that.âRuss Andes interviewed me from Studio D during the broadcast of Secrets From Silicon Valley on the occasion of opening our new San Francisco studio. Listening back not quite a decade later, I hear my younger self speaking to me now, reminding me of the profound sense of purpose and gratitude from the early days of CreativeLive.
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Podcast: CreativeLive YouTube
Episode: CreativeLive Co-Founder Craig Swanson Interview
Website: https://www.youtube.com/creativelive
