Unscripted Small Business

Abbey Crane
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Marketing

Our Unscripted Collaborative hosts Keith Bresee, Zaneta Chuniq, Keiron Bailey & 17 year SEO industry expert Jeremy Rivera are having unscripted interviews small business owners, founders and creators across the United States, learning about their challenges, successes and insights into the world of SMBs.

  1. 3d ago

    The Six-Part Flight Plan for Small Business - Bruce Ashford

    Your business is an airplane, and most owners only watch the one or two parts that are on fire. Bruce Ashford of The Ashford Agency spent 19 years in the nonprofit sector, 14 of them in the C-suite, and now runs a certified Small Business Flight Plan practice for founder-led businesses. He walks Jeremy Rivera through all six parts: leadership is the cockpit, marketing and sales are the two engines, products are the wings, overhead and operations is the body, and cash flow is the fuel. Read the full episode recap. Bruce explains why the quickest wins are usually meetings and messaging: a tight all-staff meeting, a leadership meeting about roadblocks and owners, and a 15-minute standup. First impressions may be visual, he says, but commitments to act are message based. That is the work of his Million Dollar Message intensive. He answers a cash flow question left by Malith Gamage from a past episode: Profit First, lock down the home front before you invest, and give the business three critical economic objectives with a deadline and a reason. Then voice of customer data, and the throwaway client comment he turned into the centrepiece of his marketing. They cover seasonality, why pain is the pathway to progress, and the legal basics every owner skips (Jeremy brings up his talk with Phil Crowley). Bruce closes on the trust economy: you now have to win the trust of the humans who buy from you and the AI models that recommend you, through three lanes that run from schema and NAP consistency to reviews, pricing transparency, case studies, about pages and author pages. Bruce was first on the show in an episode on why your customer is the hero (his own write-up). Subscribe to his biweekly Executive Intelligence Files at theashfordagency.com or find him on LinkedIn. More from the network: Unscripted Small Business - Jeremy Rivera.

    The Six-Part Flight Plan for Small Business - Bruce Ashford

  2. 4d ago

    The Second Job Nobody Warned You About - Peter S. Bergeron

    Peter S. Bergeron closed his family's business in 2020, a year after his father died, then went back for a doctorate at 50 to find out what went wrong. The author of The Trapped Operator joins Jeremy Rivera to name the second job every owner gets without warning: the business of running the business. Peter explains why the best leaders are the ones who end up trapped, why most owners were never business trained, and how the accidental business owner goes from swinging a hammer to arguing with the bank about ratios. Read the full episode recap, or Peter's own take on why doing everything right can still feel like survival mode. He keeps the finance plain: your lender wants your debt service ratio, your line of credit is your receivables and inventory, and no single customer should be more than thirty or forty percent of revenue. His six-question snapshot often shows owners who feel like they are in survival mode are actually doing fine. The simplest test is a tally sheet by the desk: count the questions you answer that belong to someone else's hat. They get into fire prevention versus firefighting, why the exit plan belongs at the start (the same logic as writing the operating agreement before you need it), and why a second location is really a second company. Jeremy brings up Brandon Moon's end-of-business consulting and Peter answers a guest from an earlier episode on growth stages. On AI, Peter sees a force multiplier for repetitive work, not a replacement for the thinking. His parting message: you are not alone, even when the business makes it feel that way. Find Peter's diagnostics and playbooks at 12fatalissues.com and his IP library at wrestlingagainsttime.com. More from the network: Unscripted Small Business - Jeremy Rivera.

    The Second Job Nobody Warned You About - Peter S. Bergeron

  3. Sep 23

    The Tail Can't Wag the Dog: Tom Malesic on Agency Culture

    Tom Malesic started EZMarketing thirty-five seconds after quitting a boss who refused a client he disagreed with. Twenty-nine years later he runs the opposite kind of company. This one is about culture, client concentration and when to fire a customer. Read the full written recap. Key takeaways Core values are the culture. Not a poster. The hire who said “I gotta cover my ass” is the story that proved it. The tail cannot wag the dog. The book is deliberately a large volume of small customers, so the top five could all leave tomorrow without a single redundancy. The customer who makes your team cry has to go. He coaches customers the way he coaches staff, and fires the ones who will not be coached. One toxic employee wrecks a culture and your public reviews with it. The cost is not the salary. Fully remote on an operating cadence. Three countries, and an eleven-thousand square foot office holding four people. One trained AI agent per client. Across roughly seventy models, so the machine knows the client’s voice better than any single team member. The tail cannot wag the dog EZMarketing deliberately runs a large number of small customers rather than a handful of large ones. It is less efficient, and it is the reason the company survives losing anybody. His test is blunt: if your top five clients all left tomorrow, would anyone lose their job? For most small businesses the honest answer is yes, which means those five clients are quietly running the company. Firing the customer A customer once made an employee cry. That customer is no longer a customer. The revenue is replaceable and the employee is not. He treats it as coaching first: customers get told when their behaviour is a problem, the same as staff do, and most of them adjust. Remote, on a cadence The team is fully remote across three countries, run on an EOS cadence. Weekly rhythm, clear numbers, and accountability that does not require anyone to be watched. One agent per client Each client gets its own trained agent, built on Hats.ai across roughly seventy models. The point is not speed. The agent holds the client’s voice and history more completely than any one account manager, and it does not leave. He also flags the session-recording and accessibility demand letters now landing in small-business inboxes. Questions this episode answers How much client concentration is too much for a small business? Should you ever fire a customer? What does one toxic employee cost you? Can a small team run fully remote? Go deeper Tom’s first interview, on the website as the center of everything. This conversation first aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. More owner conversations at Unscripted Small Business. EZMarketing is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and offers free website audits.

  4. Sep 16

    Why Podcast Guesting Beats Chasing Oprah - Victoria Bennion

    Victoria Bennion has been booking experts onto podcasts since 2019 through The Best Podcast Guest Booking Agency, and on Unscripted Small Business she explains why her clients stop chasing Oprah and Joe Rogan. A niche show puts you in front of "the people that need to hear from you," the host is often your ideal client or your next referral, and most hosts hand you a backlink in the show notes. She tells the story of the leadership author whose one-sheet got read as a resume and turned into a webinar contract, a conference keynote and 300 book sales, and the coach whose cats landed her a client. Victoria also covers why you do not need expensive equipment, why her team added a speech coach and a practice interview on their own podcast after an author showed up with a script, why she still pitches by hand while hosts drown in AI-written pitches, and who should hold off on podcast guesting until they have a solid offer. Jeremy adds why the interview is the information gain for a small business site. Victoria's "you don't need to be on Oprah" line now anchors Jeremy's essay Podcasting Is the Fastest SEO Channel Right Now, and her point about the host being the real prize runs through Why Podcasting Sits at the Center of My SEO Practice on SEO Arcade. Victoria trained in journalism, moved into communications, and went freelance in marketing when her daughter was born. A course on supporting authors mentioned podcast guesting, a business owner in the course's Facebook group asked for help getting booked, and she put her hand up. Six years on she runs a team, a speech coach and a practice-interview show from Dorset, with most of her clients in the US and Canada. Jeremy's full recap, with the transcript, is at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com. In this episode The host is the real prize. "Sometimes our clients find that the host is their ideal client and they end up working together." If not, the host introduces them to other shows. The backlink in the show notes. Most hosts link your site, and some of her clients guest mostly for the SEO. Jeremy's podcast-powered link building runs on the same mechanic. The one-sheet that became a resume. Her first client's leadership pitch turned into a webinar contract, a conference keynote and 300 book sales. None of it was the outcome she pitched for. The coach and her cats. One listener wrote in: "I knew you were the coach for me." Attract the right people, repel the rest. Share stories. The one note from her speech coach: "We remember stories far more than facts." Freelancer to team. SOPs, checks and balances, learning to trust other people with your clients, and the first holiday she could fully step away for. AI in the background, never in the pitch. Hosts are getting flooded with AI-written pitches, so hers stay fresh. Same reason Jeremy backs human-certified, expert-sourced content. Who should hold off. St...

    Why Podcast Guesting Beats Chasing Oprah - Victoria Bennion

  5. Aug 24

    AI Can't Be an Author or an Inventor - IP for Small Business

    Richard Gearhart founded Gearhart Law 20 years ago and is about to sign its 5,000th intellectual property client, and on Unscripted Small Business he explains what AI just broke. Copyright attaches the moment you create the work, "the best deal in intellectual property law ever," but registering it is what unlocks statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per occurrence. AI cannot be an author and AI cannot be an inventor, so using AI as a tool is fine and the trap is scope, because the problems start "when AI starts adding ideas to the invention that the inventor never contemplated." Richard also covers Getty demand letters, why a trade secret dies the moment it can be reverse engineered, and the expert-witness case where LLM-drafted work got turned over in discovery and killed the case. A footnote on why any of these rules exist Richard's episode is about rules that decide who owns a thing. Copyright attaches the moment you make it. AI cannot be an author. A patent needs a human inventor. None of that is obvious and none of it is natural. Somebody wrote it down, and they wrote it down because a harm had already happened to someone. That is worth sitting with, because it is not unique to intellectual property. Take oxygen. Ordinary air is about 21% oxygen. OSHA draws its line at 19.5% - below that the atmosphere is officially oxygen-deficient and you are not supposed to send anyone into it unprotected. That is a gap of one and a half percentage points, and your body gives you nothing to notice it by. Oxygen depletion has no smell, no color and no taste. Nitrogen, argon and helium do not poison anybody. They simply take up the room the oxygen used to occupy. PureAire's breakdown of oxygen depletion and how to prevent it notes that a few breaths of depleted air is enough for impaired cognition and coordination, rapid breathing, and in the worst case unconsciousness or death. Impaired cognition is the cruel detail there. The first thing the hazard takes is the judgement you would need to get yourself out of it. So the regulation does the work your senses cannot. Someone had to choose 19.5%, write it into law and enforce it, because you cannot feel the difference between air that is fine and air that will kill you. A room full of leaked nitrogen looks exactly like a room. That is the same shape as Richard's argument about AI and authorship. The law insists a human be the author, and it says so because "who made this" stopped being something you could settle by looking at it. In both cases the rule stands in for a sense we do not have. The difference is only in what it costs to get it wrong. Miss the copyright question and you lose the ability to enforce something you believed you owned. Miss the oxygen question and somebody does not walk out of the room. Both are consumer protection. One is just slower.

    AI Can't Be an Author or an Inventor - IP for Small Business

  6. Aug 23

    Why a 5% Close-Rate Lift Beats 20% More Leads | Alex Radetic, Nuvo Agency

    Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten. Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it. In this episode Home services is a new-lead business, not a retention business, a repeat client for the same job you already sold them is usually a bad sign, not a win. Why paid social beats organic social for trades companies, crews are doing labor, not photography, and a one-to-three-million-dollar company has no budget for a marketing person to chase before-and-afters. The speed-to-lead flowchart, call queue on day one, second call plus voicemail on day two, then an email every seven days for fifteen days. Worth five to ten points of close rate. Sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT in an entire year, on an account running three hundred to six hundred leads a month. Alex's read on what AEO and GEO are actually worth right now. ChatGPT's Yelp licensing deal, and the groans he got when he told a client they now have to fix their Yelp reviews. Read the SERP before you promise the keyword, “attic insulation” is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe's; “foundation crack repair” is shopping and informational with no businesses on it. No volume column tells you that. Where your impressions actually go, ten searches a month in the AdWords API versus eleven hundred impressions in Search Console, plus AI Overview citations counting as organic impressions. Publish the pricing, a padded range, every factor that moves it, localized. Alex calls it the easiest E-E-A-T win in home services, regardless of company size. Honesty as a sales strategy, six to nine months for a brand-new domain, no guaranteed rankings, and turning down a job because the repair method itself was dishonest. Chapters (00:00) Meet Alex Radetic, a decade of home services marketing out of Missouri (01:01) Why home services never gets a repeat customer (02:46) Why paid social beats organic social for a trades company (04:05) Speed to lead: the flowchart that beats more traffic (06:16) The black hole after the conversion (07:36) AEO, GEO, and sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT (11:55) Yelp, reviews, and reputation management 2.0 (13:59) Say the thing you actually do (15:25) Keyword research you can't do from a volume column (17:35) Where your impressions actually go (21:21) Foundation repair is an education business (23:02) Interview your own crew for content (24:08) Put the pricing on the website (25:45) Turning down the work you can't stand behind (27:42) Why he won't guarantee a ranking (30:20) The low-hanging fruit: E-E-A-T you can actually ship (33:20) Where to find Alex Radetic Notable quotes “A five perce...

  7. Aug 17

    Phil Crowley on the Operating Agreement That Wasn't

    Phil Crowley spent 30 years in the Johnson & Johnson Law Department, about seven of them as chief FDA regulatory counsel for J&J's biotech and high-technology products, before he started Crowley Law for life sciences and technology founders. He was a research physicist first: Stevens Institute, then the PhD program in experimental physics at Harvard, working on superconductivity. He opens with the client who wanted to save money and pulled an operating agreement off the internet for his LLC. It was not an operating agreement. His partner was supposed to run the distilling side of a new vodka brand and instead got, in Phil's words, a little bit too fond of the juice and slept at the plant. There was no legal way to remove him, the partner sued first, and the client nearly lost the $50,000 he had put in. What Phil covers The co-founder conversation nobody wants to have. Vision, commitment, time horizon, and the hard one: if we part ways, how does that look? A founders' agreement is a prenup, and people in agreement do not want to think about it. Write the business plan anyway. It will be wrong. The planning process is what forces you to answer who does what and where the money comes from. How to spot the wrong lawyer in one call. If they get hostile or cannot be bothered to talk to you, that is your answer. Phil also points founders at technology accelerators. He sits on the board at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Lead response. Jeremy reads him the numbers from the Ignitvio Lead Response Study and asks where his firm actually falls. Phil answers honestly: a 24-hour target today, staged email flights in Lawmatics, and a plan to have a receptionist call web sign-ins inside five to ten minutes. Regulation designed in, not bolted on. FDA work at J&J across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and devices. Recognise the regime early and you build for it instead of redesigning after the fact. AI in law firms. The firms that embrace it will be looking at the ones that forbid it in the rear view mirror, and the lawyers filing hallucinated case citations are getting sanctioned for it. Phil has his staff use private mode and play. The Credo. Robert Wood Johnson wrote it in 1943 as the majority stockholder and put stockholders last, after doctors and nurses and patients, suppliers, employees and communities. Enron had a beautiful statement of principles too. Nobody enforced it. Pi and the Ace of Diamonds. The five values Phil's own team picked together: Professionalism and Integrity, then Accountability, Communication, and Effectiveness/Efficiency. His book is Avoid Startup Failure: Learn the Top Ten Causes of Failure for Technology Startups and How to Turn Them to Your Advantage, on Amazon in softcover, Kindle, Audible, and Spanish softcover. The Amazon link is an affiliate link. More from Phil on the business divorce problem and on handling a partnership dispute, and there is more on scaling without losing your core over at SEO Arcade. Connect with Phil Crowley Crowley Law: crowleylawllc.com LinkedIn:

  8. Aug 11

    AI Isn't Taking Your Job. It's Taking Your Tasks.

    Brett Schklar has asked eighteen hundred chief executives how AI adoption is actually going, and the honest answer is badly. He founded AI First Leadership, runs a fractional marketing firm with thirty-plus contractors and no employees, and wrote AI Without the BS after hearing the same failures on repeat. Key takeaways Intelligence is now effectively free and unlimited. Which leaves judgement and wisdom as the only things that still scale with a person attached. It is taking tasks, not jobs. The people in trouble are the ones whose role is entirely a list of tasks. IQ, EQ, AIQ. His framework for what a leader now has to hold at once. Curiosity has to come before creativity. You cannot generate anything worth having about a question you never asked. The Moneyball play compounds. One per cent better each week is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output over a year. Never hand AI strategy to the IT department. It is an operating decision, not an infrastructure purchase. On this page Intelligence went free Tasks, not jobs IQ, EQ and AIQ The Moneyball play Customer service, last and best Why slop is a reputational risk People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Intelligence went free The opening move of the workshops he runs with chief executives is to take the thing they have been selling off the table. If raw analytical capability is now abundant and cheap, nobody is paying you for being clever. What is left is judgement, which is knowing which of the available answers is the right one here, and wisdom, which is knowing which question was worth asking. Neither compresses well. Tasks, not jobs The reassurance and the warning arrive together. The unit being automated is the task, not the role, which means most jobs survive in a changed shape. The exception is the role that was only ever a stack of tasks with a person on top managing them. Brett is direct that those people are the ones who should be worried, and that the fix is to move up into deciding rather than doing. He cites the framing that easy tasks become automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible. That third clause is where the opportunity actually is and where almost nobody is looking. IQ, EQ and AIQ IQ, which used to be the whole game and is now the cheapest input in the building. EQ, which is what makes anyone follow you into a change they did not ask for. AIQ, which is knowing what these systems can genuinely do and, more usefully, where they will confidently mislead you. The reason it works as a framework is that it stops the conversation being technical. A leader who is strong on two and blind on the third will make predictable mistakes, and you can name which ones. The Moneyball play For a small business he does not recommend transformation. He recommends compounding. One per cent better each week, across the whole team, is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output by the end of the year. The point of framing it that way is that nobody has to be convinced of anything dramatic. It is a small enough ask to survive contact with a busy week, which is the o...

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Our Unscripted Collaborative hosts Keith Bresee, Zaneta Chuniq, Keiron Bailey & 17 year SEO industry expert Jeremy Rivera are having unscripted interviews small business owners, founders and creators across the United States, learning about their challenges, successes and insights into the world of SMBs.

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