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. 1d ago

    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:

  2. 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...

  3. Aug 3

    Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara | Sherri Langburt

    Sherri Langburt bootstrapped BabbleBoxx into an Inc. 500 influencer marketing agency that productizes campaigns for every kind of business — not just the beauty brands everyone pictures. She argues small local brands actually hold the biggest opportunity, and that the first hurdle is fear, not budget: not every creator costs a million dollars, and the real question is whether the influencer you pick can move a sale — because selling a pool is a lot harder than selling mascara. Sherri walks through the pre-flight checks that decide whether a campaign converts or embarrasses you (inventory, store geos, landing pages, promo consistency), makes the case that AI cannot replace the human in the loop, and names the channels nobody is crowding: Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch and LinkedIn. Creators can pitch her team through the BabbleBoxx influencer sign-up. Read the full recap: Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara In this episode: Why small local brands have the biggest influencer opportunity — and why fear, not budget, blocks them Awareness creators vs. creators who actually move product, and asking for trackable sales data The pre-flight checklist: criteria, inventory, store geos, landing pages, promo consistency “If it’s happening to the influencer, it’s happening to the consumer” “The universe is your CRM” — why a SaaS platform became an agency Can AI replace the influencer? “Isn’t that just an ad unit?” The channels almost nobody books: Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch, LinkedIn, Substack Going past the tent poles — the November 1st promo nobody runs Bootstrapping, a 20-person lifestyle business, and turning down the wrong client Remote team culture built on trust rather than monitoring software Why physical is coming back: mailbox moments, merch, events, community Connect with Sherri: babbleboxx.com · LinkedIn · case studies and trend reports via team@babbleboxx.com More episodes: Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

  4. Jul 29

    Fix the Workflow First: AI That Sticks in Small Business

    Most companies buy AI backwards — they pick a platform before they have named what they are actually trying to fix. James Ernst of Core Order thinks that single inversion explains most of the disappointment small and mid-sized businesses feel about AI. James spent eighteen years in marketing and public relations at agencies around the country, took a three-year detour running his own restaurant in Buffalo, and has spent the last two years working in AI full time. Core Order isn't an AI agency — he calls it a growth architecture firm, and the distinction is the whole argument. In this episode The question that comes before the tool — not which platform to buy, but what you are trying to make structurally better. Why tools go unused — departments each buy their own, a few people adopt them, and the company's data ends up scattered exactly where AI can't reach it. Homebrew vs. off-the-shelf — pull data from the CRM you already pay for via API or an MCP server, then build the narrow workflow around it. Security and hallucination — the only two objections James hears in every room, and how he answers each. Financial data specifically — locked-down databases, enterprise accounts where your inputs aren't training the model, and locally hosted open-source models. An agent swarm that researches prospects — feed it a domain and a contact name, get back a company profile and recommended services. Regulated industries — capturing HIPAA constraints, red lines and approved language in the discovery session instead of after something goes wrong. Four hours a week to thirty minutes — the concrete win, and why the reclaimed time goes back to your people rather than into a headcount cut. Chapters (00:00) Villain origin story — eighteen years in PR, and a restaurant (03:09) What a “growth architecture firm” actually does (04:39) The subscription graveyard every business has (06:25) Homebrew or off-the-shelf? (08:09) Making sure AI says the right thing about you (10:29) Internal workflows first, AI search later (11:28) The two objections: security and hallucination (12:41) Where the wins actually show up (13:50) Is your financial data safe? (15:38) Case study: an agent swarm that researches prospects (17:22) Hot take — superpower or distraction (18:50) Regulated industries and approved language (21:39) Which verticals are primed (23:40) The pain point underneath everything is time (25:14) On being kind to the robots (26:10) Imposter syndrome at the frontier (28:45) AI slop and the rising value of human work (31:11) Where to find James Ernst Notable quotes “The first question you should be asking is not which tool should we buy, but what are we trying to make structurally better?” — James Ernst “AI could either be a superpower or a distraction.” — James Ernst “I don't leverage AI to write anything for me, because that is such a part of the human process that I want to keep.” — James Ernst Resources & links Core Order — James's growth architecture firm The Core Order blog, including Why Enterprise AI Investments Fail and Intelligence Is a Commodity

  5. Jul 22

    Stop Lighting Marketing Money on Fire: Speed-to-Lead for Property Managers

    Cameron Tope runs a several-hundred-door residential property management company in the Greater Houston area — and he operates it 100% remotely from San Diego. In his second visit to Unscripted Small Business, the founder of Emerson Property Management lays out why $20,000 a month in marketing is worthless if nobody answers the phone, how AI became a delegation tool rather than a magic box, and why he gives his entire playbook away on purpose. Cameron is broker, owner, and founder of Emerson Property Management, serving several hundred owners across Greater Houston while running the whole operation from California. He started the company after he couldn't find a manager for his own rentals — while at risk of losing his oil-and-gas job and carrying a lot of debt — and has done it full-time for six years (and unofficially for over ten). Returning listeners first met him in Episode 1: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity. In this episode Why speed-to-lead is the cheapest growth lever there is — and how slow follow-up is "just lighting money on fire" The two hires that changed the business: a dedicated salesperson for inbound owner calls and a marketing person How agent referrals and "accidental landlords" drive Emerson's pipeline in a higher-rate, higher-inventory market Turning on SEO only after operations were solid — and why Cameron was deliberately slow to marketing Using AI as a delegation tool, not magic: after-action reviews on evictions, screening-criteria checks, and saved-prompt analytics Why the biggest AI gains go to novices, not veterans — new hires absorbing senior knowledge fast The "give them the recipe" moat — why publishing everything doesn't hand away the business RTMs (remote team members) as the first step toward AI, and the delegation-vs-abdication line Applying the theory of constraints — focus is now the scarce resource Chapters (00:00) Meet Cameron Tope: Houston property management, run from San Diego (01:27) The marketing engine: a salesperson, agent referrals & accidental landlords (03:48) Speed-to-lead: "you're just lighting money on fire" (07:50) AI as delegation, not magic: AARs, screening & novices vs. veterans (13:46) The give-it-all-away moat: "we can give them the recipe" (16:56) RTMs and the delegation-vs-abdication line (20:49) Remote ops & offshoring pitfalls: the Raven Tools story (29:18) Theory of constraints: focus is the scarce resource (31:23) The roadmap: own Houston, build a life, don't sell (34:08) Where to find Cameron Notable quotes "You spend $20,000 a month on marketing, but you don't have anybody answer the phone, and you get back to them two days later — you're just lighting money on fire." — Cameron Tope"We can give them the recipe, but it's not going to taste the same." — Cameron Tope"RTMs are kind of the first step towards AI. If you have a good process, you can delegate it." — Cameron Tope Resources & links Emerson Property Management — everything's there, including Cameron's free accidental landlord guide for owners deciding whether to rent or sell Cameron's first appearance: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity...

    Stop Lighting Marketing Money on Fire: Speed-to-Lead for Property Managers

  6. Jul 20

    Build Your Website for the AI, Not the Human — Richard Hickman, Piqued Consulting

    Richard Hickman spent his first career hunting Russian hackers as a digital-forensics consultant. Then he became a stepdad to five kids overnight, walked away from the on-call life, and started helping his wife build her coaching business — which accidentally turned into Piqued Consulting, a marketing agency built entirely for high-ticket coaches. In this episode he hands Jeremy Rivera the exact playbook: the CRM foundation that comes before ads, the pricing math that decides who he'll even work with, and why you should be writing your website for the AI that's reading it, not just the human. Richard's ideal client is an established coach making around $20k/month who's stuck under a "referral ceiling" — great at the work, no predictable sales system. His agency's job is to install the foundation, dial in the offer, and only then turn on paid acquisition. Along the way he makes a sharp case for answer engine optimization (AEO), email marketing, and never betting your whole livelihood on a single platform. In this episode The CRM foundation comes first — centralize communications in GoHighLevel, get a company phone number off your personal cell, and build speed-to-lead before you ever run ads. Don't turn on ads until the offer is dialed in — and why he won't work with a coach whose offer is under $4,000–$5,000. Price to cover your cost of acquisition — collect enough cash upfront to pay CAC twice over, charge upfront (or half now/half in 30), and stay far away from pay-on-results. The coach-to-advisor shift — reposition so a successful client keeps you for the next milestone instead of graduating away from you. AEO/GEO in practice — "build your website so an AI cites you," and title blog posts as the exact questions prospects type into ChatGPT. Email is the most underutilized channel — value-add sends weekly, the jab-jab-jab-hook rhythm, and why he's never unsubscribed from Grant Cardone. Never rely on one platform — the creator with millions of followers and zero emails who nearly lost everything in the TikTok outage. The authenticity paradox — how to market credibly for profit without becoming the person prospects "can smell." Notable quotes "You need to be building your website to where it's not necessarily geared towards a human being visiting it, but an AI visiting it." — Richard Hickman"Who reads blogs anymore? AIs do. Perplexity reads your blog. ChatGPT reads your blog." — Richard Hickman"Social media is great, but don't rely on it, because it could go away in an instant and we've seen it happen." — Richard Hickman Resources & links Free AI visibility audit for coaches: coachingaiaudit.com — checks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude cite you, then gives pointers to fix it. Piqued Consulting — Richard's marketing agency for high-ticket coaches. Richard on Instagram: @piquedconsulting Richard's new podcast, The Business of High Ticket Coaching — launching soon. Go deeper on AI visibility & answer engine optimization. Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Every episode at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

  7. Jul 20

    The $100/Hour Rule That Ends $10 Busywork | Louis Swart (benefit / outcome)

    A broker once told a cocky 25-year-old plumbing-company owner five words that gutted him: "Louis, your business is worth nothing." Five years later Louis Swart sold his next business for $5M — and the only thing that changed was delegation. In this episode of Unscripted Small Business, Louis (founder of Iron Brij) unpacks the systems that turn a business you own a job in into one that's actually worth something. Louis has built and sold companies the hard way — a plumbing business a broker valued at nothing, a later business sold for $5M, and another scaled to $35M and 450 staff. He's also the author of The B Myth (The Busyness Myth). Across the hour he trades practical, hard-won tools with host Jeremy Rivera on delegation, SOPs, creativity inside parameters, using AI without producing slop, and beating the "badge of honor" trap of being busy. In this episode Why a broker said Louis's plumbing business was worth nothing — because he did the accounts, hiring, and quality control himself The delegation shift that let him sell his next business for $5M (and later scale one to $35M and 450 staff) Why every stage of growth brings "different levels, different devils" — and how to borrow someone who's already been there Building SOPs and checklists that survive "Chinese whispers" (a.k.a. telephone) as teams go remote and offshore Where to enforce parameters and where to deliberately leave room for creativity The Friday AI stand-up where every team member brings one new AI tool they've learned Treating AI as an "Iron Man suit" — "creativity in, creativity out" — instead of drowning people in AI slop and "clod hopping" The $100/hour post-it rule, the post-time planner, and "eat the frog" to beat productive procrastination Chapters (00:00) Intro — why should you trust this guest? (00:38) "Your business is worth nothing" — the $5M delegation lesson (03:56) Owning a job vs. owning a business (06:29) Different levels, different devils (10:01) Systems for remote and offshore teams (12:00) SOPs and checklists (the 100-points-of-ID example) (18:56) Surviving "Chinese whispers" as you scale (22:56) Creativity within parameters + the Friday AI stand-up (25:00) "Creativity in, creativity out" — killing AI slop (28:56) AI as an "Iron Man suit" (and the blend humans still need) (38:48) The Busyness Myth: busy as a badge of honor (40:44) The $100/hour post-it rule (44:29) The post-time planner + eat the frog (51:06) Where to find Louis and the book Notable quotes "Louis, your business is worth nothing."— Louis Swart (quoting the broker)"Would I pay somebody a hundred dollars an hour to do this task?"— Louis Swart"Creativity in, creativity out."— Louis Swart Resources & links Louis's book — The B Myth (The Busyness Myth) Louis Swart's site (free post-time planner & tools) — louisswart.com Iron Brij — ironbrij.com.au Connect with Louis on LinkedIn and Instagram On avoiding AI slop, Louis and Jeremy get into why founders still need human...

  8. Jul 19

    Ali Raymer - Unscripted Small Business Interview

    Ali Raymer launched her own agency the week this was recorded. Nine years in travel, a Title I high school English classroom before that, and a straight answer to the question her industry keeps ducking. No, you do not need a travel agent. Booking is solved. What she sells is the part that is left over. Key takeaways Agent and advisor are not the same job. Booking flights and hotels is the part Expedia and an AI assistant already do perfectly well. Travel advisors are barely regulated, and she wishes they were. No individual licence, no continuing education, and a host agency’s licence number is enough to start selling. The commission is being paid either way. A Disney cruise costs the same whether you book direct or through her, so the only question is who collects it. She outsourced the half she is bad at. A host agency runs the back-end financials, a local firm runs payroll, and she does not pretend to enjoy spreadsheets. Every personal trip is a marketing asset. Her gym analogy is the whole social strategy, and she is genuinely baffled that most advisors skip it. On this page Agent, advisor, and which one you need The licensing gap nobody talks about Where the money actually comes from Selling travel by going on holiday Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Agent, advisor, and which one you need None of that is necessarily hard. What you actually need is a travel advisor. — Ali Raymer Her opening move is to concede the entire objection. You can book your own flights. Expedia works, the apps work, an AI assistant will happily do it. The booking layer is not where a person adds anything any more, and she says so before anyone else can. What is left is judgement, and she describes it the way anyone selling a service against a free tool eventually has to. A client arrives certain they want Santorini because of a video. Ten minutes of conversation with them and their partner reveals that what they have actually described is Portugal. So many of the conversations that I have go down that path. — Ali Raymer She calls this the marriage counsellor part of the job. It is also the part a booking engine structurally cannot do, because it requires disagreeing with the customer. The licensing gap nobody talks about Asked what regulation shapes her work, she gives an answer against her own commercial interest. I think that we should have higher regulations, much like realtors do. — Ali Raymer Realtors carry individual licences and have to keep them current. Travel advisors do not. Someone can sit under a host agency, use that agency’s licence number, and start booking other people’s holidays this week.

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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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