Podcast - Goals, Questions & Guidelines
Hello there!
Here at Super Founders Club every Wednesday I aim to release one short but highly insightful podcast interview with a Super Founder about the business they operate(d) & the management lessons they have learnt throughout their career!
This post quickly explain the key details about this podcast interviews and is split into three parts:
Goals
Questions
Guidelines
If your reading this & you think you’d like to apply to be a guest, please apply here! Or if you know someone who is a Super Founder who we should feature here, please simply forward this post to them!
Thanks!
Patrick
1. Podcast Goals
So you can quickly get understand the overall objectives of this podcast and to decide whether you think you’d make a good guest!
Transparency: As explained in the Welcome To Super Founders Club post this site exists to hopefully help spur the sharing of business case-studies, management best practices & recommended 3rd party vendors/tools among likeminded business operators. As such during this interview I will be asking you specific questions about your businesses performance & while I’m ok for you to give me rounded up/down numbers e.g. ~20% profit margin, ~US$150-170 Million in Revenue, if your not happy being this open then this interview probably isn’t for you.
High insight per minute ratio: Given how time stretched we all are, I’m going to be doing my best to stick to a tight question format (see below) so we can keep the recording under 1 hour & the podcast itself around the ~30 minute mark. While we can/should go off on a few tangents based on your answers - the goal is to keep the the insight per minute ration high!
Feature businesses of all types & sizes: Today a lot gets written about ‘Hot Startups’ and while there is a lot to learn from them, my goal is for 70% of these interviews to be with profitable, well run businesses from different types of industries that people may not have heard of & can learn valuable lessons from.
Makes you look good: Very simply I’m not here to trip you up & make you look bad, the complete opposite in fact, I want people after listening to this podcast to instantly go follow you on all social networks given how smart you sounded!
Not overtly salesy: During the last batch of questions, I’ll make sure you have time to promote any new initiatives your working on, but all I ask in return is that during the interview you do your best to educate vs. sell to the audience, as this will lead to better audience engagement & in turn a better over all outcome for you! Please understand if not followed, I probably won’t release this interview.
2. Questions
Rule of 3 & 10 Questions
The first questions are related to ‘The Rule of 3 & 10’ & are designed to help the audience get a clearer understanding about the size & type of business you operate(d) so they can have more context about what insights/learnings apply to them given their business size/type.
What is the name of the business you operate?
Please describe what the business does?
How many people worked at or did you manage at this business?
What was the Annual Revenue/GMV?
What was the Annual Net Profit?
What was the Net Profit Margin?
What was the Annual Growth Rate?
Business Strategy Questions
The second set of questions, is where we dive a little deeper into the business strategy around your business & look to bring to the surface some of the key leanings/lessons.
What made this business super?
What were the key challenges the business faced?
What was the best 3rd party tool or vendor that x10 your business?
Management Questions
For the third set of questions, we focus back on to you & specifically what are the big personal ‘A Ha’ discoveries you’ve come across during your career/
As a manager what were you super at?
What are you not so super at?
What have been you biggest management style changes over time?
Personal Questions
Finally to wrap things up, we focus on more open ended questions that are less related to your previous business and more about what you’re currently working on.
What’s ‘interesting’ to you right now?
Do you have a personal motto or words you live by?
What is a business or Super Founder that inspired you & who Super Founders Club should interview? Why them?
3. Recording Guidelines
Hopefully answering all of the more technical / operational questions you may have about how we will actually record these podcast interviews.
Zoom Recording: To make things very easy we will simply conduct the interview over Zoom which allows recording of conversations.
1 Hour Recording Goal: As shared above I’ll look to keep this interview relatively short, meaning that hopefully we can keep the total recording length to under 1 hour.
Audio Quality: If you have a dedicated microphone - please use it! Aside from that please just record in a place which has great Internet speed, isn’t too echoey/has sound absorbing furniture! If kids/pets interrupt don’t worry about it and let’s just keep on!
No Video Needed: For these interviews to maximise audio quality, we will keep video sharing off, as such no dress code, make up or haircut needed!
Please help promote once live: Here at Super Founders Club we rely on organic traffic to grow overall awareness, as such once the interview goes live if you can help share to all you social channels / newsletters / slack groups / etc. I’d really appreciate! As the more of us there are the more super we will be come!
Thanks for reading this far, hope the above helps & looking forward to having you or a Super Founder who you recommend on the Podcast!
Thanks,
Patrick