How to Turn Content Into a Real Business Asset | Nicky Pecone

PROFITABLE TALKS...

What if the future of media isn’t controlled by platforms—but by creators?

In this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim talks with Nicky P of Iron Age Marketing about the rise of DIY media, the power of podcasting as a relationship-building tool, and how creators can turn content into real business outcomes. This conversation explores why community, consistency, and clarity of purpose matter more than chasing downloads.

PROFITABLE TALKS...

•  What the “Iron Age of Media” means for creators and entrepreneurs 
•  Why podcasting is more about relationships than audience size 
•  The biggest mistake podcasters make when starting out 
•  How to use content as a consistent growth and marketing engine 
•  Why email lists are still the most valuable asset you own 

I Am That Content Creator Podcast
The podcast for multi-passionate, serial entrepreneurs.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Join our community of creative entrepreneurs and get a free copy of our No-BS Guide To Making Your Creative Business Actually Profitable delivered straight to your inbox. We’ll share smart, simple tips to help you keep more of what you earn—no boring accountant talk, we promise.  
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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.226)
Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Wausau, Wisconsin. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Thank you for listening, even if I did mispronounce it. Joining me today, Nikki Pecone of Iron Age Marketing. Nikki P, welcome to the show.

Nicky P (00:28.514)
Thanks for having me there, Christian.

Christian Brim (00:30.568)
Okay, so I am fascinated first by Iron Age marketing. What does that mean? Why did you pick that name?

Nicky P (00:37.038)
So I want to say this is probably about three years ago. This term started creeping out into into the internet with this thing called the Iron Age of Media. And the whole concept behind it was it was kind of a niche thing happening out of the comics gate movement. But it was this idea of. Kind of everybody and maybe.

Christian Brim (00:48.79)
Okay.

Christian Brim (00:59.348)
Okay.

Nicky P (01:05.267)
starting from one part of the political spectrum, but I personally felt it went much broader than that where people are just getting tired of the everything by consensus, everything by committee watered down where you're going to read what we tell you to read nonsense going around. And you have a lot of creatives that were, you know, not fitting the mold. Like one of my guests I had in the initial run of the podcast was actually a young black woman who got told her story wasn't black enough.

Christian Brim (01:18.101)
Hmm

Christian Brim (01:21.791)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (01:35.497)
okay.

Nicky P (01:35.694)
So they wouldn't accept her to a publishing company. But the idea was people are so tired of the corporate nonsense that the only way you're going to do out in is to go do it yourself. So we're here, we're at the iron age of media. know, the golden age, silver age, whatever. We're here where it's all DIY, do it yourself. And you're just, that's just going to be the way you do it. And one of the things that I think we learned from that like whole process starting is this.

Everybody across the board feels screwed over by large companies. They've taken advantage of us for years. And in my business, which largely is podcasting, you end up, one of the best things that you can have is that face, that personality, put that up front. And the work's good that businesses, when you get to put a face to them and you don't get to feel like that mindless, soulless corporation, because

Christian Brim (02:07.894)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (02:31.414)
Mm hmm. OK, so OK, let me let me ask this because I'm not familiar with term or the movement. Is is is that like going medieval or or is that a comparable term?

Nicky P (02:32.364)
You know, in a world where everybody hates them, it's great when you get to be the person leading the charge, the person upfront.

Nicky P (02:52.855)
Well, so to be more specific, medieval, so much. It's more a matter of I think that a lot of the guys that were created were fantasy authors or aspiring fantasy authors. And so to think, know, Iron Age, it's in line with their sword and sorcery kind of aesthetic they were going with. And I'm a Dungeons and Dragons guy myself. Part of my whole reason kind of getting involved with those people is because

Christian Brim (02:58.08)
Okay.

Christian Brim (03:04.224)
Okay.

Christian Brim (03:12.352)
OK.

Nicky P (03:21.709)
I'm a fantasy and science fiction kind of guy. So if I can help people create more books that I'm interested in reading, then by all means, why wouldn't I? And so I just kind of took it on myself when I was coming up with a name for the company, like, all right, well, let's go with Iron Age Marketing.

Christian Brim (03:30.916)
Sure.

Christian Brim (03:36.818)
Okay, so you did that about three years ago is what I heard. What did you do prior to that?

Nicky P (03:42.74)
Mm-hmm. Prior to that, I've worked as a side musician for a number years. I've been pseudo professional for probably 25 years now. Well, that's the way I've always treated it. I would get paid since I was 17 years old doing it. Never been my full-time commitment, but it's been, you know, the part job. Other than that, I was actually

Christian Brim (03:58.582)
If you get paid, you're a professional. doesn't matter how much. That's right.

Nicky P (04:11.571)
I work in electrical maintenance, we'll say, for a lot of that time, which was working in air pumps and vacuums for number of years. I also worked for an ATM company and of bank fault for a number of years, which I actually ran a bank fault for a couple of years in there. So I've done a number of things and then some things moved around in the economy, things, and I found myself a job and I'm like, well, I picked up all these skills from, you know, being in bands and

Christian Brim (04:14.87)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (04:27.409)
Okay.

Nicky P (04:41.557)
I don't know, probably about 10 years ago, I got really interested with the podcasting movement and marketing and started podcasting, started getting really into marketing. said, well, let's throw a shingle up and kind of see what can happen with that.

Christian Brim (04:53.854)
Okay. All right. So what instrument did you play? Or do you play?

Nicky P (04:57.933)
I have played everything but drums at this point.

Christian Brim (05:01.854)
Okay. Yeah, okay. What's your preference?

Nicky P (05:07.197)
I'm, well, you can't tell I'm coming out, out, so it's some bronchitis here, but I'm a vocalist by trade. If I were to pick the second favorite, it's always bass.

Christian Brim (05:15.83)
Uh, yes. Well, uh, I, uh, yes, I think the, um, whole musician thing is, is fascinating. had a friend when we were in high school, he got his first guitar. I remember sitting in his room and, uh, he's kind of picking at it and he goes, you know, you play keyboards, we should start a band. I'm like, no, no, no. Thank you.

Um, that, sounded like an interesting gig. And he went on and, uh, had a successful music career for a while and toured. then, you know, eventually kind of became a music producer as a side hustle. But I don't think music ever leaves you. Um, it's one of those things that I think it's more.

Nicky P (06:01.185)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (06:11.766)
interesting when you can play with others as opposed to just playing by yourself making music with other people is is a thrill I miss honestly okay so what attracted you to podcasting

Nicky P (06:14.701)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (06:27.085)
Well, if it's not obvious, I am a bit of a talker. so any excuse to get out there and talk to more people? Honestly, a lot of it for me initially was I had a newborn kid and kind of found myself having a lot of political issues with things that were going on in the country at the time and kind of fell in with this group of libertarian podcasters and made a bunch of friends there. But then like my interests started going

well beyond just the politics. And I've had everything from environmental podcasts to music podcasts, eventually podcasts about podcasting.

Christian Brim (07:09.108)
Yeah. Were you, were you a podcast listener when you started or no?

Nicky P (07:14.349)
Uh, you know, it kind of feels that way. Podcasting has been this weird thing in my life where, uh, when I was back in college, think in 2006 actually wrote a paper about the future of advertising, this thing called podcasting. And then I don't think I thought about it again for another 10 years, but that's, you know, I started seeing a lot of my favorite comics, uh, we're starting to come out with podcasts and big Jay Oakes and stuff like that.

Christian Brim (07:27.147)
Hmm.

Nicky P (07:42.123)
And started listening to a lot of those guys, the broken lizard guys were doing that. And so I'd find myself just kind of entranced by these long conversations where you really get to know people. We call it what is it the pseudo social relationship now or something like that. to me it's always funny because in marketing, it's like the best secret weapon in the world is to get people to think they know you really, really well when they don't necessarily know you really, really well.

Christian Brim (07:58.1)
Hmm. Yeah.

Nicky P (08:11.245)
If you're going for that KLT, a pseudo social relationship, it's the best thing you can have.

Christian Brim (08:11.38)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (08:15.99)
Yeah, it is interesting because I didn't, I mean, I started a podcast, I started two podcasts two years ago and I had never listened to podcasts. I was not a connoisseur. I had listened to talk radio when I was younger, but I don't know if it's because I quit driving as much or what, but I just kind of stopped listening to it. But it is that,

social connection, which is asynchronous, you know, it's one way. But you do feel like you're part of a community. And, you know, you even go back to the old radio station days, you know, pre-Cyrus and all these things that those those local radio DJs were like icons in the community and they and

Nicky P (09:12.983)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (09:14.56)
To your point, like when you actually met them, they looked nothing like what you thought they looked like from listening to their voice. I do think it's interesting as I've kind of been working in the podcasting space and talking to a lot of folks that have done podcasting a lot longer than I have and much better than I have, how it shifted as a marketing advertising medium from

you know, having a podcast that was interesting enough to sponsors and advertisers to monetize it, uh, to more of a way to build credibility in the community that you're, you're, you're wanting to talk to. Um, can you speak to that in your experience?

Nicky P (09:57.228)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (10:01.645)
Well, it's kind of funny, I said, I actually wrote a paper on this for college back in 2006. And it actually became more of what it was envisioned as, I think, in the early years. Like their idea was we're just going to make these big, long commercials for the, know, whatever product it is, and we're to put them out there and people can get a little download at frequency. And and what when it began like to kids, well, that's kind of thing. What is and.

Christian Brim (10:26.272)
So more like an infomercial.

Nicky P (10:30.039)
Well, we don't think of it that way. Most businesses that are using podcasting today, it is kind of the idea of it. Now they're maybe not being saying, look at how great this product is. What they're really relying more on is the connection and the personality to build that know, like, and trust for the people that listen to them would be perspective. Now, there's also the big thing I always say podcasting is that there's, there's what you get. And then there's what you actually get.

For me, like when I pitch it to people, the big thing is like, everyone's always like, I need more social media, more social media, more social media. And if nothing else that you can get out of podcasting, it's like, I don't have a million people listening to me. Podcasting to me is more about your email list. It's ensuring that you have something to send to your people every week and something to put out in your social media every week because

Christian Brim (11:18.102)
Mmm.

Nicky P (11:27.329)
Podcasting forced you to always have content. It is a content generation machine and it's not poor. Kind of like, you can be sitting there manufacturing memes for the next six months or coming up with these great stories that the algorithm does not care about. It doesn't care about your text. It does not care about your little image. Maybe you'll be lucky and catch something for some reason it was viral, but it wants to push video. So you want to do things that are going to help feed it video to send out to people.

Christian Brim (11:30.518)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:43.254)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:58.772)
Yeah, that's also an interesting shift from strictly an audio format to a video format. And I'll put a pin in that as you were, and come back to it, as you were talking, I read a Substack article about how the death of streaming is imminent and it went through the technology platforms, Apple, Spotify, et cetera, and Prime.

And talked about the business model behind it. was like the author is a guy in the music space. and, it got me one of the, one of the quotes in there that I found fascinating was that none of the, streaming platforms, which, you know, include podcasts, allow for the facilitation of community. Like there's, there's no way to.

Nicky P (12:36.525)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (12:57.334)
connect or engage in those platforms. know Spotify has added some comment features, but it's just not, it's not really a great medium to connect community. What do you see from your side?

Nicky P (13:00.685)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (13:18.637)
I mean, that's actually a really, really good point. All of the really big, good communities I can think of, and I'm thinking of like the no agenda guys. they have a massive audience that is very, very connective. They're doing actual meet space meetups every month in a lot of places, but to do any of that, you have to go off platform. in their case, that's why the podcasting 2.0 thing has been a big deal. Like they're trying to.

Christian Brim (13:35.989)
Right.

Christian Brim (13:42.422)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (13:48.173)
generate actual commerce and actual interaction through podcasting with podcasting 2.0. Now, right now, most of the stuff involving that is so technical that I don't know when we'd ever see adoption. There's certain other things that are cool. Like if you set up on the lightning wallet, you can actually directly send Bitcoin to your favorite streamers and things of that nature. But to me, it has always been short sighted that you have to go off platform to

interact with people like why doesn't Apple podcasts have some feature in there other than terrible comments to go and interact with people? I think it's because they don't care. Their thing is the attention is to you, you do what you're on their platform. Why they've never tried to maximize it rather maybe you just have to go to the next podcast is what they think just for advertising.

Christian Brim (14:25.138)
Right, right.

Christian Brim (14:29.898)
No, they don't.

Christian Brim (14:34.804)
Well, the

Christian Brim (14:39.188)
Well, that was what this Substack author was saying is Apple just has music to sell iPhones. They don't care about the content and Prime is essentially the same thing is to get you to renew your Prime membership, keep you in their ecosystem. their ecosystem plays for Prime and Apple and Spotify is the only independent one, but they're screwed because their margins are fixed.

Nicky P (14:46.893)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (14:57.313)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (15:08.202)
They pay, they add more content, they pay out, you know, more dollars. Their margins are fixed essentially. So what do you see works as far as creating community in these podcasts communities?

Nicky P (15:13.441)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (15:18.413)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (15:32.157)
It's kind of depends on like what, what your people are, what your audience is, who you're trying to reach. some, some people don't even understand how they've built the communities. They've, they've done, had a guest on my podcast a of weeks ago, who's got a podcast about logistics and that's how he sells his, his, business. I'm like, I, even after talking to the guy, I'm still kind of a little like, I don't understand how that works.

Christian Brim (15:37.942)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (15:45.622)
Sure.

Christian Brim (15:59.625)
Yeah.

Nicky P (15:59.917)
If it's working for you, buddy, congratulations. But, you know, the people that manage to take advantage of, know, things usually it's like, through Patreon is where you'll get people that'll kind of show up. YouTube is actually probably the only one that is pretty good at fostering like in-house community, like good chat threads. I mean, on the negative side of that, you'll get people that do a lot of brigading and, you know, that kind of stuff.

Christian Brim (16:25.686)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (16:29.357)
Any way you can keep people there kind of talking. think another thing with the podcasting 2.0 is like, can actually leave some of the apps out where you can actually live chat during the podcast and things like that, or interact in some sort of like all of the chats are timestamped to it. So while you're listening, you can kind of be interacting with people who've talked before you about the podcast, similarly to how it works with YouTube.

It's a...

I guess from the mechanical perspective, I'm always a matter of let's get people back to email because emails super personal. Like they would, they've been saying for years, it's going to die. You can remember the whole Apple thing like, they're, they're making it. So now you can conceal your email. This is going to be the death of email marketing. And that was what, like 2019 that happened. And it's, it's still the best way I know to own your list and reach people without question.

Christian Brim (17:10.847)
Interesting.

Christian Brim (17:31.572)
Well, yeah, and that you own it. You're not beholden to a platform that can turn you off at any moment.

Nicky P (17:38.529)
Like I've had personal friends that like were running multi-million dollar, multi-million person, Facebook pages back in 2016 that just lost them overnight. Facebook said, up, boom, you're gone. Now they don't answer you. Like it's been almost a decade and they've still never gotten an answer as to why their page was new. It just was. Some of these people were actually running businesses off of these pages. You know, it's just, it was, they thought, here's this wonderful.

Christian Brim (17:49.808)
Mm hmm. Go.

Christian Brim (18:03.53)
Right.

Nicky P (18:07.693)
stream of people coming directly to me. Well, then ultimately Facebook put the kibosh on that and managed to suck all those numbers up. Well, if you're not paying, you're not going to show it to anybody anyways. So I, for me, I've always felt like the social media companies have been very short-sighted as far as what they're going to do long-term. I mean, maybe I think all internet businesses in that case, I was listening to a conversation the other day. know

Christian Brim (18:20.276)
Yeah.

Nicky P (18:36.679)
I w it seems inevitable now that I've heard that it happened. But the, the idea that people are, what am I really getting out of my return on Google anymore? Because the user experience, like going there as a person who's just going to Google has become so garbage. Like I don't get, I don't get to search for the things I want to search for. All I do is get the list of crap that Google wants to tell me to get by. Cause somebody

Christian Brim (18:48.854)
Mmm.

Nicky P (19:06.061)
paid for the advertising. There's no...

Christian Brim (19:08.778)
Well, and after the AI answer, you know, you've got to go way down to even find the original source searches, right? Beyond the sponsored and beyond the AI.

Nicky P (19:16.969)
Exactly. So it's like you're now you're you're people are paying crazy amounts of money to an audience that's kind of fine. How much longer are they going to be here before they find something that actually meets their needs better? You know.

Christian Brim (19:33.878)
So I'm going to pivot. I still haven't gone back to the point I put a pin in, but I'm going to pivot. Tell me who your target customer is. Who is it that you help?

Nicky P (19:46.349)
So, when I started, my initial thought was I want to help all these comic book creators and authors and, you know, creative types go out there. And because a lot of those guys are there guys like me, they're, you know, dads in their forties, don't have a lot of experience, don't have a lot of money and wanted to help them kind of find out how to reach their audience. Because these guys don't have any sense of what's going on.

After a year and a half of doing that, realized, oh, these are not the people with any money to pay me and I've got kids to feed. So ultimately my ultimate pivot was to solo preneurs, people that are in coaching spaces and things like that. They don't have big teams of people. They've got small businesses. They're working on creating a modest podcasting collective.

Christian Brim (20:33.759)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (20:45.028)
It's kind of found my niche there, you know?

Christian Brim (20:47.648)
So when you say modest, you know, what, what.

Nicky P (20:50.477)
I'm not looking for, people maybe, you honestly, usually beginners even at that people, know, a couple hundred to a couple thousand followers that are trying to figure out how to do this, be a little bit more professional and most probably not have to do everything themselves. Basically get set up for the big boys club as it would be.

Christian Brim (20:58.944)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (21:10.878)
What do you find the most common mistake that they make as podcasters?

Nicky P (21:19.309)
I hate the word mistake in that sense.

Christian Brim (21:24.092)
opportunity that they have not taken advantage of. How about that?

Nicky P (21:27.693)
Well, this is the opportunity. Maybe the silliest thing I might say is that people don't understand enough of what they're really doing because they don't understand marketing enough. And what is, what is this podcast? What is its goal? People don't think, what am I trying to do with this? And anything that you approach without having a, even if it's wrong, but having some sense of what you believe.

Christian Brim (21:40.479)
Mm.

Christian Brim (21:53.024)
You

Nicky P (21:56.363)
The return is going to be on something. lot of times people will find that the real value in their podcast isn't what they want to do. So many people go like, all right, well, I got to find out how to monetize this thing and get a million people. They're to listen to me and are going to. And if that's something you want to shoot for, by all means, I'm not the guy that's going to help you get 10 million people watching you. What I will show you how to do is how to take the audience you have.

get them to know you better, start building slowly while maintaining the top of mind presence. It's really what most people are after in business. The internet moves so fast that I think people think, well, I've got that like, it's all done. know, people are going to know to come to me whenever something happens. But the bottom line is, know, even, with email, people get added to the email list and they don't hear from you for six months. And when they don't hear from you for six months, you don't exist anymore.

Christian Brim (22:51.062)
Mm.

Nicky P (22:55.031)
They're going to get that first email, like, what is this thing that I signed up for unsubscribe and that's going to be the end of it. Whereas the relationship that you're building through the email list, usually starting with the topic that you have for your conversation is so much of maintaining and keeping and growing an audience. And when people go into this, they...

Christian Brim (22:55.21)
Yeah, they've forgotten who you are when you get in it.

Christian Brim (23:02.869)
Yeah.

Nicky P (23:21.453)
They're usually like, how can I make a million dollars in podcasting as opposed to what can this really bring to the table for me? And a lot of the times people don't and they completely discount for me, like partially because of what I do as a business. It's been the meeting people part of it. It's the relationships that I've developed over. I mean, I've been actively podcasting since 2017. So the number of people I have met, built relationships for,

And then word of mouth becomes, you know, eventually becomes the sales for me in a lot of ways. But that's probably one of the biggest things that I think a lot of people get out it. You go on one podcast, somebody sees like, I saw you and so and so I think maybe you'd be good over here talking to this person. I'd love to hear what you guys would have to say. And I know it works because as a listener of podcasts, man, there's so many people I'll like send an email to like, Hey,

Christian Brim (23:55.869)
Right.

Nicky P (24:17.739)
I just heard you over here talking to so-and-so and man, I personally want to hear this conversation between you and this guy. If there's any way to make that happen, I think you might have a really cool conversation and draw some eyeballs for what you're trying to do. It's just not understanding which direction you want to take your podcast from the beginning is one of the biggest problems, I guess. I don't want to say a mistake because I think the whole idea of podcasting is a certain amount of growing.

Christian Brim (24:34.255)
Yeah.

Nicky P (24:47.231)
learning what works for someone person may not work for you. You have to find the way that you fit into that. Some people are really good at the... You're very good at the guest, host, conversation style podcast. Some people are just really good at giving a monologue and you don't know until you're there doing it and you kind of find out what the thing is. Moreover, just because you like doing it and are good at it doesn't mean that's going to be what your audience is going to gravitate towards.

Christian Brim (25:05.812)
Yeah.

Nicky P (25:16.853)
and you don't know that until you start doing it.

Christian Brim (25:19.39)
Yeah, that's a good point. I think I've probably only had two solo episodes out of 150. I mean, like I or well between both podcasts, it's probably closer to 200 episodes and only two of them are monologues. And, you know, there probably is some more space for that, to be honest with you. I do like what you say about the community, though, because

I find I'll get different, I'll connect with people either via podcasting or in person, not like, I met somebody on LinkedIn because you don't really know that person, right? So podcasting, I have a conversation with someone, I get an idea of what they're about, what they're trying to do, you know, whether they're an asshole or not.

Nicky P (26:06.85)
Mm.

Christian Brim (26:14.422)
And then, you know, I'll go in, I'll make that connection between, you know, I can, I can think of one recently where it was just like, two need to know each other. Like I can see where you two have some synergy. You're, you're talking about the same things. You have the same interest, you know, et cetera. and I find that, you know,

Nicky P (26:33.997)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (26:39.72)
I actually like doing that. I like making those connections between people that don't know each other. And I'm like, how do you two not know each other? in the, you should be in the same circle, right? But I love that about community because I think that's, you know, whether that's actually the podcast community or not, it's building the ecosystem.

Nicky P (26:47.393)
Yeah.

Nicky P (26:53.677)
you

Nicky P (27:03.565)
Well, just to boost your point there, my initial exposure to you was I watched you and Vince Quinn have a conversation together of SPX Productions and I thought it was a great conversation. I think I reached out to you and said, hey man, I love what you're talking about here. Something that had a fact in.

Christian Brim (27:11.03)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (27:18.004)
Yeah, I love Vince. He's he I love his voice. He's he's he's good. He Yes, and and he's actually one that I have connected with with others because, you know, this this whole podcasting agency thing where people are working with business owners to use podcasting in a in a broader marketing, not not

Nicky P (27:26.987)
He's an excitable man.

Christian Brim (27:46.15)
marketing the podcast, but using the podcast as part of their marketing is kind of a new thing in the last, I don't know, three, four years. And, and, and so I guess it's still, everybody doesn't know everybody yet.

Nicky P (27:50.359)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (28:02.669)
Mm hmm. I mean, I've been doing this man literally podcasting and I have a very similar background and that I like I was educated to become a radio personality. Didn't end up doing that, thankfully. But, you know. Well, exactly. And I kind of grew up in a place with a very small radio market, like one or two stations and was never going to be for my personality type on either of those particular two stations. So.

Christian Brim (28:16.49)
That's a tough gig.

Christian Brim (28:25.748)
Right.

Christian Brim (28:30.71)
Well, you never know, look where Rush Limbaugh started. it can happen. It can happen.

Nicky P (28:35.165)
Yeah, it's true. You know, as I think from the Herald and Cumber, I tend to find the universe unfolds as it should. It's the line.

Christian Brim (28:45.654)
Yes, yes. Okay, so when you work with other business owners, what do you have like a menu of services that you offer or is it like a customized consultancy? Like what does that look like?

Nicky P (28:59.886)
Customized consultancy would probably be the best way of putting it. Everything looks different for everybody. And because the types of podcasts can vary so much, we're trying to decide like, what do you want it to be? How often do you want it to be? What are the goals? And what are you capable and willing to do? I work in-house with a good friend of mine I've known for years now.

Christian Brim (29:04.49)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (29:10.582)
Mm.

Nicky P (29:29.769)
actually from the podcasting space, his business, I actually host his businesses podcast. And part of the reason for doing that was as his host, he doesn't have, I can be there so he doesn't always have to. I can bring on other members of his business. So he's got to leave town and he can't do something. I just bring on one of the other guys. We never lose time. We never lose focus.

Christian Brim (29:38.194)
Okay.

Nicky P (29:58.231)
But the other issue is that we found that he was going on to do a lot of podcasting and he was having difficulty.

Christian Brim (29:58.911)
Okay. Okay.

Nicky P (30:09.581)
He's in the finance space and he was having difficulty, like, cause he's not terribly interested in a lot of what mainstream finance people are interested in. And so we've got to cross this bridge. We've got to make you at least seem like you're more knowledgeable in the general finance space than, you know, where you are. And so it gave me a reason to have a weekly conversation with him about like general finance knowledge. And it gives him the weekly chance.

Christian Brim (30:34.058)
Okay.

Nicky P (30:39.085)
to show people that he actually does know what he's talking about. He just doesn't always like talking about it. And so it's a way to, as we would say, prove your expertise. You're out there trying to show, I know what I'm talking about in this space. I'm not an idiot. Just because he'd rather talk about video games than talk about finance. it would eventually work, so we do the podcast, but he eventually started, as I've been pushing him to for years,

Christian Brim (30:44.982)
Yeah

Nicky P (31:08.813)
combining his love of video games and the finance world. We had a video that we put on his YouTube channel a couple months ago on... One of those video games, I think it's the one where you have the dogs on the island or something and something happened where it gave you the economics of inflation essentially. He did one a couple weeks ago like...

Christian Brim (31:25.82)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Nicky P (31:35.349)
on people who, and on the idea of Valve being a greedy monopoly, even like, know, but let out there a monopoly, like they're probably one of the best run companies in the, like the entire video game space. It's hard to like, hard to hate them. It's like the quote unquote greedy monopoly.

Christian Brim (31:40.084)
Yes.

Christian Brim (31:51.496)
Right. Right.

Christian Brim (31:57.544)
Yeah, I think I find that that guy's story interesting because like I I tell people that I have a podcast and it's about, you know, turning passion into profit, you know, creative entrepreneurs, et cetera. And they're like, well, what do you do? And I'm like, well, we have an accounting and finance firm. We do those kinds of services and like, well,

You don't talk about accounting. And I'm like, no, I that that absolutely sounds awful. If I were to talk about the nuts and bolts of our business, I just, and, and, know, maybe that's why I haven't done a lot of monologues because the two that I have have been specifically around, you know, tactical topics, which is fine. And maybe that's what people would, would want, but I started this podcast because

When I wrote my book, I went on several podcasts to promote it and they were fine shows, but they weren't having the conversation I wanted, which was the, the business aspects of, you know, a creative professional, a creative business. and that's why I created the show was to have the conversation I wanted, which, you know, back to your point, what, was your expectation? How was that going to work out?

Nicky P (33:04.961)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (33:23.894)
I still haven't figured that out. I'm still like, I really don't know. I have started to see where we've, we've had people come in that have listened to the show. And so clearly it's having an impact, but, um, you know, if you, if you put, if you put the screws to me, I would, I would say that's not why I do it. I don't, I do it to have the conversations to expand.

Nicky P (33:48.14)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (33:52.618)
the community to expand the awareness and knowledge of people out there that, okay, if you're passionate about something, it may seem like you're odd and no one wants to do it, but there's absolutely a way for you to make money with it. So anyway, I'm just rambling.

Nicky P (34:12.139)
Well, and I got excited. have a friend, personal friend who has been podcasting for going on nine years. He's an architect. And the podcast that he runs is very specific. It's called Inside the Firm. And it is a basically him and his architecture firm have a weekly podcast. It's been in many ways so successful that nine years into it,

Christian Brim (34:30.378)
Okay.

Nicky P (34:43.213)
He had Dell buy his entire team new computers as a sponsorship deal. He's he's made multi-million dollar deals out of the relationships that he's built from his podcast at this point. And it's now just to get onto his podcast. It's such a is such a difficult. So it's such a difficult task to go through all of the people that want to be guests on his podcast.

Christian Brim (34:47.922)
Okay. Okay.

Christian Brim (34:55.732)
Hmm

Nicky P (35:13.527)
that he has to start charging. Like if you want to be on the podcast, I'm sorry that it's going to cost you because I don't have the time to deal with all of the mail of people wanting to come out of the podcast. Now, the guy's an architect, but he's managed to in about every way imaginable, found a way to monetize that podcast.

Christian Brim (35:15.094)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (35:27.134)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (35:35.946)
Did he start out with that intent though?

Nicky P (35:40.293)
I think when he started out, it's just because he felt like he had to have these conversations, much like yourself. I think a lot of us, people that have been doing it a long time, that is why most of us started, is we just felt like these conversations needed to be had, either nobody with the type of voice that you wanted to be having was having them, or they just didn't exist at all. Now, as much as people are like, oh, it's such a saturated market, I hate to break it to you.

Christian Brim (35:44.445)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Nicky P (36:07.743)
It's so not saturated market because podcasts just don't work that way. They just don't work that way. The idea of this is also super niche. Like, yeah, you're, never going to be Joe Rogan, but you're not trying to be. That's, that's, that's not, that's not the value that most people get out of this. I think one of the reasons I do podcasts in general, like besides, you know, outreach and is because.

Christian Brim (36:11.638)
Why do you say that?

Christian Brim (36:18.261)
Yeah.

No. No.

Nicky P (36:37.581)
Man, people can put a lot of words into your mouth. Well, I've been podcasting since 2017, and I can tell you this, there's so many hours of me talking that good luck trying to produce enough content to outweigh the things that I have publicly said to stuff any words in my mouth.

Christian Brim (36:40.854)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (36:55.349)
Right.

That's a great point. And it kind of cycles back to what you said originally about like putting a face to the name, even though it may be audio only. The format lends itself to really diving into your thoughts, your beliefs about the subjects rather than just a blog post or an email copy.

Nicky P (37:06.925)
you

Christian Brim (37:28.326)
people engage with audio differently than visual reading for sure and different than video but to me I still and the reason why I went audio only from the gate was I didn't want the extra burden of you know lighting and video editing not that I ever did the audio editing on my own I hired that initially I mean out of the gate I don't like I'm not I don't want to learn a new skill

Nicky P (37:31.767)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (37:57.904)
but this idea that you, you, you have to use your, your mind when you're dealing with audio only, it's the theater of the mind and not that I'm doing a, a story, production here, but it just engages your, your brain differently. I, know, I don't know that that's why I'm just not real interested in like adding video just because the algorithm wants it, you know,

Nicky P (38:07.789)
you

Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (38:21.623)
What does it?

Nicky P (38:28.779)
Well, as a marketing guy, the first thing I'll say is YouTube's the second biggest search engine in the world. I hate to not be there.

Christian Brim (38:34.602)
I know, I know, I know. did acquiesce, I had a recommendation from an SEO marketer and she said, go into Google, go into Reddit and just start typing some of the key topics and see what comes up in the search to see what other people are searching around that topic and then use that as your.

episode title. And you know, we did, we started doing that a few weeks ago and actually has seen a lift. I, I, I can't attribute it straight to that, but it, there is, I think some correlation of being found. Like you, you've got to be searchable, by the algorithms, unfortunately, or no one's ever going to find you.

Nicky P (39:27.359)
Absolutely. I have a fantastic podcast that I do with one of my bandmates kind of talking about music and movies and our band. And I'll be honest, haven't quite cracked a nut on how to get people to that one. I love doing it because it's me, my buddy talking about the things we love to talk about. But, you know, it's that's also a much harder pitch for me to make than, I run this business and this is my audience and this is I'm trying to talk to you because sometimes it's who you talk to as a musician.

Christian Brim (39:40.853)
Well...

Nicky P (39:57.175)
Who is this weird group of people that's interested in this particular genre of music, this particular group of movies, and a bunch of middle-aged dudes making it in Ohio, you know? That's a bigger pitch.

Christian Brim (40:02.922)
down.

Christian Brim (40:07.902)
Yeah, well, mean, I know it is. Maybe it's not a bigger pitch. It's a smaller audience. Maybe I don't I don't know. But, you know, I think that's why Alex Sanfilippo with pod match does some interesting research and with his platform and you know, his statistic was how what few percentage like 10 % of of podcasts is the launch of maybe even less than that they get to episode 100.

Which is either, you know, it's some time frame between one and two years, right? Depending on how frequently you're doing it. I guess unless you're doing a daily show. But the point is, I think that a lot of people start out with misintent or unknown intent and they don't take the time to figure it out. They don't take the time to like explore it and say, okay, well, what is gonna move the needle?

Nicky P (40:36.365)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (40:53.674)
in

Nicky P (41:03.949)
that used to be seven episodes was the big thing. Most people never reach seven episodes. And if you can do that, you're in the top 1 % of 1 % of podcasters. I don't know how much of that holds true today, even if you can, podcasting even for me is like, when I say the word podcasting, it has a broader meaning to me because it's really about content creation because what's different,

Christian Brim (41:12.734)
Right?

Christian Brim (41:29.523)
Hmm.

Nicky P (41:31.041)
When what we make our little shows about sure most of them are just talk shows. But if you remember lore, I don't even know if it's still running, you know, but if they're doing these deep dives and these weird little, you know, stories and, you know, historical items. That's not the same thing really as what I do. So why, why do I have to necessarily. And when the goals are the same as people who make YouTube videos, to me, it's two different ways of doing the same things. And maybe.

Christian Brim (41:49.471)
Right.

Nicky P (42:00.685)
Maybe evergreen content on a YouTube channel is a better route for somebody to take than trying to do something topical like podcasts or topical and whatnot. And when you're just taking it from, the only thing that makes things, you know, is it a conversation? Well, anybody who does a monologue podcast, is that now not a podcast? Cause that two way conversation isn't there. I say podcast is the thing I'm the most familiar with and personally.

Christian Brim (42:27.69)
Right.

Nicky P (42:29.431)
But it's really about content creation and meaningful content creation, what you do with that content. It's about, frankly, doing something to create a funnel. What are you doing to give people, to give them value, to put at the top of the funnel, to collect the email address, to get them into your world where you can have that communication and get them into your world as opposed somebody else's? Technically, I do many of very same things that Vince Quinn does.

and was super excited he was on episode number one of my second season of Iron Age Marketing. And I went that way because...

I think people get to, these are my audience. I don't want my audience to know anybody else who does what I do. And so I purposely invited a guy who does almost the exact same thing I do on, because that has nothing to do with that. What it has to do with is the people that like me are probably not going to be big fans of Vince. The people like Vince are probably not going to be big fans of me at a personal level because we're both very different guys. I love Vince. I think he's a great guy.

Christian Brim (43:14.645)
Sure

Nicky P (43:32.513)
He's also probably not somebody that if I were to meet in any other context of this, that we would just spark up a conversation and have a lot to talk about because he's a sports guy. Other than the fact that I ran cross country in college, I'm not a sports guy. I'm a Dungeons and Dragons and music kind of guy.

Christian Brim (43:45.362)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (43:50.25)
Yeah, and I to that I actually had another accountant on the show early on and you know, for that exact same reason, like, know, kind of it. That show was as more more technical probably than I would prefer, but it wasn't a very listened to episode. And so I didn't repeat it, but.

To your point, it's raising the conversation as a whole. So I agree. I would have accountants on here all day if they would have good conversations, but I...

Nicky P (44:25.367)
Mm-hmm.

Nicky P (44:32.653)
Well, it's like so much for me. It's like I'm not afraid of my audience because my audience is my audience and his audience is his audience and If somebody prefers somebody that they'd rather do business with who might have stopped them from doing business that person I'm confident enough in what I do that you want to work with me. We can work together if not You got other people

Christian Brim (44:44.084)
Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.

Christian Brim (44:52.439)
There's a lot more to be had by cooperating than there is, you know, taking this, this, you know, fixed pie aspect and say, you know, there's only so much pie we can divvy up and I can't give you any because, know, yeah. Nikki, how do people find out more about Iron Age marketing if they want to work with you?

Nicky P (44:55.892)
Exactly.

Nicky P (45:12.973)
Easy, they just go to ironagemarketing.com and you can pick your poison. listen to the podcast. You can talk to me about actually improving your or starting your business podcast. Or if you're really into Dungeons and Dragons, I have a book I'm working on finishing up right now, specifically geared towards teaching basic marketing to people that are into role play games called The Role Player's Guide to Marketing.

Christian Brim (45:36.468)
Ooh, I love that.

Christian Brim (45:40.598)
I love that. All right, listeners, we'll have those links in the show notes. If you like what you heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, hit that little mail message button, shoot us an email and tell us what you'd like to hear and I'll get rid of Nicky. Until next time, ta-ta for now.

Nicky P (45:42.728)
You