Special Announcement: Why I'm Stepping Away From the Podcast

Brad Weimert (0:00)

I'm not killing the Beyond A Million podcast all together, but I am closing this chapter. And I want to tell you why, because I think that the why is far more important than the what itself. I started recording conversations with people years ago, not because I wanted a podcast, but because I knew a lot of interesting people, and I found myself having really interesting conversations that I wanted to listen to again. At the time, I had no interest in launching a podcast. But what became clear to me is that outside of my immediate friend circle, it was actually difficult to convince interesting people to sit down for an hour or hour and a half to record something for entertainment purposes. So the podcast was formed because I knew that if I had a platform, it would be an opportunity to rope people in to having good conversations with me. I had three objectives when I started the podcast because I had to think, how do I create alignment with this? I couldn't create a podcast just so I could have good conversations and also be in alignment with my other business objectives and the rest of my life. To me personally, alignment is the path to progress, and it's the path to happiness ultimately as a result. I personally pick that over balance, where I feel like I'm all in on something and I'm ignoring something else while I'm doing that. I would much rather have all the things I'm interested in work together. So the way I wanted to create alignment with Beyond A Million was, first and foremost, I knew that I could open dialogue with potential clients for Easy Pay Direct, get them on the podcast and then convert them into clients. Win, win, win. Everybody is in a great situation if that happens. Number two, I had follow-up sequences for Easy Pay Direct that basically just said, hey, do you want a merchant account? No, no, no, but really, do you want a merchant account? And so creating content around business that was really, really good from really credible people was an opportunity to speak to our lead set and our clients and give them more information that they needed to run their business. Number three, if it ever got there, the podcast could serve as top of funnel to funnel more and more leads into the Easy Pay Direct ecosystem. Four years later, 250 episodes later, and thousands of hours into this later, we did a good job of converting guests into clients and generating some revenue from that. There is definitive evidence of that. We did a great job of repurposing content and producing great stuff that we got super positive feedback on. Those are all the episodes, all the clips, and repurposed in ways that quite honestly, never would have even occurred to me. The other benefit to shooting the podcast that I didn't see coming was just general exposure.

For me, one of the biggest net wins has been our recruiting pipeline for Easy Pay Direct. So every prospect, every potential employee, every employee that ends up in the company, ends up seeing the podcast.

Through that process, they are indoctrinated into who I am, how I lead, how I interact, and what the company culture is likely to be like. So there have been these phenomenal elements that have come out of doing the podcast so far, not to mention just conversations that I get to have with great people both on the show and off the show because of it. Where we didn't hit in full was creating top of funnel, and largely that is my dysfunction for not running it as professionally as I could, and not as my buddy Dan Martell would say, going pro. We just didn't allocate the resources to actually make this thing the lead generation machine that it needs to be, and I will blame myself for being distracted and trying to do too many things at once.

As a result, today, I am choosing to stop recording podcasts every week or releasing podcasts every week because it is no longer aligned with the goals that we have in the company. Namely, we've spent the last two years building epd.com, or EPD Commerce is the name of the product.

Agentic Commerce is how most business will be done in the future. Simply put, that is agents buying from the storefront or agents buying from agents. The infrastructure for that is still being built out, and EPD Commerce is on the forefront of making that happen. Most of my time and energy is being focused on that inside the walls of Easy Pay Direct. Recording a podcast and releasing every week is no longer in alignment with that.