Unfinished Business episode 82: Love a good pep talk
Last year, when we took a month-long holiday away from work, Anna Debenham was still a regular on Unfinished Business and she and guests took over the podcast. Since Anna left I’ve steadily built up a small group of regular, rotating co-hosts including Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag. So it made perfect sense to leave Unfinished Business in their capable hands for the three weeks I wasn’t around to record because of this year’s holiday.
I left Laura with some tips on recording and editing—most of which I originally learned from Anna—,notes on sponsor reads and logins for the services we use to host the show. She and Ashley took it from there and recorded three very good episodes:
It’s fun listening to Unfinished Business when other people record it. It’s especially interesting to hear how Ashley and Laura interpreted the ‘business’ theme of the podcast.
The content of Unfinished Business has definitely changed this past year. It’s become less focussed on ‘business’ in the usual sense. I now feel that I and my guests ‘have unfinished business’ because we still have things left to talk about, including sometimes, occasionally, ‘actual’ business. I know that I’ve lost listeners because of the shift in emphasis.
I sometimes wonder if there’s a limited lifespan for podcasts that have a narrow focus, whatever that focus might be. I kept asking myself, “how many times can we talk about contracts or invoicing or payments before we run out of things to say?” Keeping a podcast fresh is hard, particularly on a weekly schedule like ours, and I felt a change was needed after Anna left.
Plus, one of the reasons why Anna and I started Unfinished Business was because so few people wrote and spoke about business issues. Today, there are other podcasts that cover many of the issues that we set out to talk about, and have done, over 82 episodes.
For the last three weeks, Ashley and Laura have recorded episodes that are much closer to Unfinished Business’s original premise and it’s been nice to read the overwhelmingly positive feedback to these shows. I know that people still appreciate business content. I suppose the key is to achieve a balance between conversations about business and others about films and cheese and weeing in hotel kettles.
This week they talk about using social media for business and whether writing and speaking are a scalable part of your business model. They also answered listener questions about forcing yourself out of your comfort zone and advice to a designer just starting out.
This episode is sponsored by Espresso and Native Summit. You can get a 10% discount on Espresso with the offer code unfinished. Native Summit are giving away 20 free tickets to the first 20 listeners who visit their site and use the offer code unfinished.