258 | How a Part-Time Podcast Built a Full-Time Client Pipeline

Most business owners hire sales reps. This one launched a podcast. Nine months later he's at 233,000 YouTube subscribers and his business has more clients than it can handle. They give you this little a grave letter and then you get your play button but you also get a desk version of the play button that it's got your thing on the back. His name is Orlando Wood and not only is he crushing it on YouTube but he gets over 15,000 listeners a month on Spotify and regularly charts in the top 50 on Apple and he achieved all of this with a simple podcast setup and while building his company full time. But here's the part that matters most. His podcast now does more for his business than any sales rep ever could. My name is Kev Michael and this is Grow the Show, the podcast for business owners who want to turn their podcast into a business growth engine. In this episode Orlando's going to break down for you how his podcast became his best sales tool and he'll walk you through how the ROI that he has gotten from his podcast far surpassed anything he could have hoped for. All that right now on Grow the Show. Orlando Wood welcome to Grow the Show. I'm so excited to have you on today. It's nice to be on. It's nice to be on as a guest. I mean you've you've taught me so much about podcasting. Not all of it. I put into practice as you can see by my terrible setup but yeah it's nice to be honest. Nice to see you. Yeah we will get into the setup thing for sure because so many podcasters and entrepreneurs that I'm talking today are worried about that. They're like I'm on YouTube. I got to have a crazy setup like you Kev and I'm like no no we'll get there. We'll talk about it. But before we dig into that can you just bring us back to before we met tell us a little bit about what your business is and why you decided to launch a podcast in the first place. You know my business is we are an IT consultancy. It's really very simple. I mean we we work specifically for creative companies. So we're Warner Brothers Accelerator Company. We work for clients like A24 and HBO. Then now we we've branched into advertising and then also law strangely. I think because we work with IP we have an IP contract. We sort of grew into law quite sensibly. So yeah it's been fantastic. You know we're an IT and AI consultancy. I think that there's a lot of sensitivity in the creative industries about using these tools but using them without subjecting yourself to even more copyright theft. I mean as we know all of these tools have the original sin of copyright theft at their heart. We got a lot of traction there. I basically I started sort of looking around and seeing like whether there was some benefit in a podcast and I actually listened to your podcast and I thought actually there's a lot of sense in this and there's a lot of people who luckily because I've worked in the creative industries my whole life in advertising and film and television. I know a lot of people but then as well there were people who I wanted to meet and wanted to speak to or people that I had a good relationship with but we had disconnected and I wanted to have a new relationship with and that has been really helpful. It's it's connecting with those people and not always in the very linear way of like having in the on the podcast and then going so this is what we do can we work together but much more kind of those people telling me about other people and saying somebody just said that they were looking for exactly what you do let me put you to in touch and I think for a lot of us who are starting a business and naturally pull back in terms of sales I was a pretty good sales person when I was out and about and meeting people at lunches and drinks and at the pub you know because I worked a lot in London now with so much being remote I mean even with us having an office at least 50% of our time is remote and doing sales from a desk on LinkedIn and whatever else it's very inhuman and it triggers all your worst anxieties about who you're being and how sales you're being and it just feels yucky and some days you feel like it's okay and you're being a bit cheeky and you're feeling yourself but you can't have a sales process that goes like this and the podcast has been consistently good I get to ask serious questions that I give a shit about you know and I think that's the other thing I am naturally curious about what all these people do and how that their work is changing I get to do something that's less sales but more marketing I suppose but has a drives real value to the business and I get to lean on what I think are my better qualities not my salesmane thing right and not my ability to get a hook in a sales email right but on my actual natural curiosity and interest in their business and their problems man I mean I couldn't have said it better now I'm like wait a minute I need to podcast more yeah so I couldn't agree more and what we like to say here I go the show is that marketing and sales is more of a continuum than one of the other and it's just podcasting just gets you so much farther down the continuum to that purchase point than anything else yeah okay so I remember I was looking back before we chatted at just like where did we start book it was in April of 2025 that we first linked up yeah yeah and if I I was at that point I think I already had what five or six episodes or something uh right but yeah so it had started but it wasn't you know it wasn't where it is today yeah so when I looked at your onboarding form it said how many YouTube subscribers do you have and it said nine not nine thousand nine so wow we've come we've come quite a way to send but can you just like paint the picture a little bit of because I'm just always super curious about what led you to book the call what led you to take the leap and so bring us back to after those four what convinced you to get help with it I think more than anything it's that I've worked in advertise I got my started advertising I've made featuring documentaries I've made you know television and and feature films or developed feature films I you know and and I actually moved out to LA because I was working on a feature film for Netflix and that then the pandemic killed unfortunately but I fundamentally recognized that every piece of media has either a purpose of some sort and it has a set of rules and now you can go about breaking the rules if you're Yorgos Lantamos or you're I mean or Michelle Gondry or whatever else you can break the rules as long as you know them exceptionally well and I think that what I didn't do is know the rules of this medium and so I was doing it I got some good guests I knew that like Kate Morrison from Google and Rafe Taylor the the head of contemporary art for bonums like these are incredible guests and a I wanted to live up to the promise of the blessing they were giving of me of their time but be I was kind of like there must be rules to this there must be rules to making this better and to be honest a lot of things you taught me because I was running a company at the same time as doing this a lot of things you taught me I hadn't even been able to put in practice until literally today I think today is the first day we have a 60 second pre-roll that's fully edited in our episode that launched a special Super Bowl episode where we spoke to the chief creative officer PepsiCo and the head of high-dive advertising about their lays Super Bowl spot and all of what happens behind the scenes and the prep for the Super Bowl spot and during the day today is the first day now that's something you taught me back then but I didn't have the ability I didn't have a full-time editor I didn't have you know a lot of the infrastructure that now that we're monetized a bit and you know and the company's doing a lot better like and we've seen the value of this we're investing more into it February 10th 2026 yeah is the first day I was able to realistically implement what you had said would be a good idea back in April and so that's going to highlight what I think will be a theme here is the is something that you have always carried into this project which is just get it out there just get it going yeah does not have to be perfect yeah because you know you I have shown some you have had intros before like it may not be a super crazy real ahead of time but you've had an intro where at least it started and said hey here's what we're talking about this is what we're going to go into today and I've shown it as an example to folks yeah oh great the other example that I've shown to folks is your setup so we talked about this a little bit before we started dear tell me so yeah just and is that when they hang up on you there's like there's no way in heck I'm working with this guy yeah no it's I use the example because I'm like look at this show is about it shows about Hollywood and it's about just the ultimate place with crazy production in the world arguably yeah and yet this show that's about this topic it does not require a crazy studio it is all about the conversation so let's talk a little bit about one of the first things that we jumped into when we went together which was the name of the show right so what was do you remember what your show was called originally the Kubrick Labs podcast yes so actually what is Kubrick so Kubrick is my the SaaS product I created with my with my partner VJ Duwan and it's a screenplay management tool so lots of different studios use it to database and manage their screenplays using AI the consultancy came out of that that company runs and is still operational that software is out there but clients started asking us to do unique different tools we were some of the first AI people they knew so we got the opportunity to build things for for great companies we didn't intend for the whole company we called Kubrick Kubrick started out as a joke between us and then it turned into the company name but yes it's it's in honor of my favorite director why did you change the name and what did you change it to we changed it to technically creative we workshopped it with you we had lots of things flying around I don't know what they were but technically creative you know your instinct was you know it should do what it says on the 10 and and so much of your advice boils down to that your intro should do what it says on the 10 your content after the intro should do what it says on the 10 both of those should relate to your title it should do what it says on the 10 if you start fudzing with it and making a promise in your intro that you don't deliver on in the content you know your discussion veers too far away you're sort of you're not coming good on the promise you're making to your customers your viewers so technically creative was chosen because it was straightforward it does what it says on the 10 and and we we went with that and it's been terrific so what I'll call out here is that we started working together about nine months ago you had nine YouTube subscribers today nine months later you're like we just now are adding these trailers we just now separated it up and in the meantime all you've done is gotten the show to top 30 on Apple podcasts 15 to 20 thousand listens a month on Spotify and over 230 thousand subscribers on YouTube yeah unbelievable work yeah but it's so a testament to you but also a testament that we don't have to have everything perfect right away and we can later optimize it so really great job and and congratulations on the success thank you very much it's been surprising I think I told you in the just before we started recording it's gotten away from me a couple times and to be honest it's gotten away from me but it's also I'm glad that I wasn't so focused on a lot of the technical elements because listen there were times where I mean I'm running a company and we're growing the company and there are times where we've got to get multiple proposals out in a week and whatever else and then I've got to do the podcast because we've we've promised it and it leads to late nights and it leads to mistakes in the upload and whatever else I mean I did a fuck-ups episode I think it was the last episode of the first season where I said this is my fuck-up man like I'm fucking up in real time you're seeing it audio drops out mistakes happen like I think that I really wrestled with that I sort of had to make peace with that because I'm a producer I recognize like like you know look like right up here there's glare up there I can see everything that's wrong with it but I also am interviewing producers I mean I interviewed you know the guy who was used to be the chairman of Sony Pictures I interviewed the ad ages you know small agency producer of the year you know I've interviewed you know Jeff Jenkins who produced the keeping up with the Kardashians and secret lives of Mormon wives and the single the the simple life like way back with you know they sort of kicked off the reality TV revolution wow when I give them or when I release and finish a podcast and it's not perfect as a producer giving it over to producers I deeply respect that hurts a little bit and so but but giving myself that grace to go listen I'm building a company like there's only so much I can do here you know I have to make peace but it does mean that as I've moved forward and as we've grown and I have been motivated highly motivated to get those things sorted out and and start proving that that we do know how to get to the next place I mean like we're recently going to be moving this is my home you know podcast setup because so much of the intros and stuff I have to do on like Sunday nights and whatever else so we don't have this at the office but we're about to move I was going to redo literally get a production designer in and get and get a new softbox and and all that kind of stuff and and literally pay for two days of of some people's time to come in and completely redo you know my office and then do a bill behind me wait is that a YouTube thing behind you that I saw when you when you moved off to the side uh this is no oh yeah yeah I bought all the things yeah I bought all three of them that's awesome so they give you they give you this little engraved letter um you know um and then you get your play button but you also get a desk version of the play button um where that it's got your your yeah I was gonna say I did not know about the desk version that's awesome oh yeah give them you know you can you can sign right in uh and get it just a really drive home the point you are talking about investing heavily in a studio and I see a lot of folks and I've done it too where you tell yourself let me invest first and then figure out how to grow the show you grew the show first and then in and now you're only now you're investing in these pieces which is so the right way to do it and by the way these producers that you're like oh my gosh I'm publishing this stuff that's imperfect what they see is the play button they see the followers they see the reach so you're good man like they're not worried about that well I think that the other thing is if everything is perfect around you you not being perfect becomes clear one of the things that we talked about when I first started this was I started this podcast about a month after I had a mini stroke which left me unable to speak for about two and a bit hours it was really terrifying I was kind of locked in and unable to express myself at all and then when it came back words were gone and so even throughout the interviews I would have moments where I would stumble or I would be searching for a word and I'd have to go you know and I'd be kind of lost now granted I can edit around that but even in times where I styled it out it was not great sometimes and I think that I probably would have beaten myself up more for that I've hid behind the imperfections and kind of stated publicly that I know they could be better and I'm a producer and I should know better but here I am I'm just trying to get it out I'm thrilled that I'm still able to speak I mean that was the yeah I think that's why it happened right after that as I was like well shit if I'm gonna lose my ability to speak this is something I should do really the big question that everyone is going to be asking when they're listening to this is how the heck did the show grow that fast how the heck in nine months did we go from nine YouTube followers nine YouTube subscribers to 233,000 and on top of that it's not just YouTube top 30 on Apple 15 to 20,000 downloads a month on Spotify that's that's some true penetration of multiple platforms so yeah what do you attribute to the spread after care of the guest that has been huge you know we work with people who work at very senior companies dogged about making sure that they know when they're going to receive the rough cut they approve it beforehand we make sure that if they have a corporate comms team it's going to them we make sure that the guest is super happy and super comfortable with the the output and then we don't ask them to post when we're coordinating day of or the days after we say how can we coordinate best when you're going to support this oh and that is that was a huge change when we because we had a lot of people were like yeah thanks and like we didn't insist on relationships beyond them at their company now we do so we will say can you please put us in touch with your corporate comms team and what one of them was especially when we deal with people who are at companies that are public Kate Morrison had a production for products and services for Google Sue Anderson vice president creative at Roblox these are companies that like if they were to say the wrong thing potentially it could impact the stock price if it went viral which which you know we do okay but we don't go viral but we do kind of say to people and even with people like you know John Peters who is very much retired but used to run Sony pictures we say to him who can you be sending this to please pass this along probably one of the best moments of my life actually was he's friends with Tony Robbins and Tony Robbins sense a very nice voice noteback and a note saying you know the person who's doing this is so articulate and did a really great summary of your life and career and I really enjoyed it and he made mention of a few things later in the episode so even if he just got his assistant to to watch it and write that I don't care as far as I'm concerned Tony Robbins saw my episode or heard my episode and that guy has been in my ear with for so many of the worst points of my life the notion that I was in his ear for even a minute thrilled me to know end but that's sort of what we do we do push a little bit our guests we're lucky to have them and the only thing we really ask other than their hour of time is that they push us out a little bit on their socials or in through their networks that had to be so exciting when you found out that it touched Tony Robbins's world it was the coolest it really was the coolest and I think that that you know listen that's that's not a testament to me it's not a testament to anything I'm doing to testament to the great guests we have but I think that making sure you capitalize off that and and listen they're on the podcast so they want to push it out as well and who knows they might be having the same approach avoidance thing that I'm having where they're like oh I don't want to shout about it but if they get sometimes the pressure from you is the thing they're grateful for because they could say to their friends who are like oh you know or whatever they can say oh yes well they really push me to post it I usually don't post stuff that's about me but you know they really lay it on thick and we do lay it on thick to be fair it's like the Kristen Wig character and I said no you're making me sing okay what that's cool I was not I wasn't sure what you're going to say to that question and I was definitely not I didn't think it would be that but it makes so much sense yeah right the grotesque of your guests right and we're seeing that more so now since YouTube has introduced collabs I don't know if you've leveraged that at all yeah just last fall they made it so that two YouTube channels can collab and it's just led to so much growth for folks on YouTube particularly interview space so great it's funny because you do that retro actively I might try to do that with lays and Pepsi and and stuff for the uh well we can talk about afterwards yeah we don't need to have a technical wrap about it on this well yeah well I know the listeners are gonna go no no no how do you do it so essentially there is a button when you're in the YouTube studio where you can collab and then it gives you a link or no no it has you choose the channel that you want to collab with and then it sends that person via email a link that they have to click and then approve the collab yeah and then after that it shows up on their channel it shows up to their subscribers I think you want to try to do it as soon as publishing as close the publishing as possible so that chronologically it shows up to subscribers but even still there's a lot of benefits that come from being linked to one of these massive channels yeah and and where I was going to go with that is like there was a moment because I've been growing podcasts since 2018 so it's eight years now there was a moment where like guests just did not share and there was almost no point to even asking them to share or trying to collab with them because it just became so saturated and difficult but we're seeing a massive resurgence in guests sharing in you know it growing on YouTube and stuff so super super cool to hear that that was a huge part is there anything else that you attribute that you think the audience might want to know to how you grew the show over the past year I don't know I mean I think put a lot of faith for some reason we all get very focused on YouTube maybe it's because it's our ourselves it's it's our own archetype of ourselves out there in the world physically and visibly but to be honest we put a lot of faith in that I think that's why we kind of snowballed a little bit on YouTube the growth on the audio platforms has been very remarkable and interesting because you get better watch time yeah and people are slightly more YouTube sort of has to be a spoonful of sugar the whole time if you want to keep people you know you're just constantly doing hooks and things like that to keep people engaged audio you can give people the medicine a little bit more which for me I'm a little bit more cerebral my intros usually try to give context to the guest because we are quite broad editorial in the guest that we choose we we will have people from film people from the art world people from from television people from advertising and because of that I know that some of my listeners are going to be from the film world listening to something about advertising like the Super Bowl in today's episode right and vice versa so what I like to do is I have a broad amount of subject matter expertise and I research going in to the interview with the guest and so I like to bring out some of that industry research and give people an understanding of where the industry is we've got on what tomorrow I'm recording with Ross Richie who is the founder of Boom Studios which is an incredible independent comic book producer helping people understand where comics which is a publishing you know a publishing industry company in 2026 right there under very tight pressure and margins helping people understand the context of that the digital revolution never really hit comics in the way that it's hit other businesses but AI is hitting comics in a very real way giving people that understanding of the economics and the the reality of it is something I like doing but it doesn't have a place on YouTube I do that our watch times just didn't it just didn't bear out that people wanted to watch me say that to camera on the audio it goes down a tree yeah I get I get so many messages of people going you know I come into your episodes and I don't know anything about AI and advertising or whatever else I stay because you give me enough information at the beginning to so it was hard it was hard knowing because I was watching it not work on YouTube but watching it work on audio and then making that decision and going well shit I've got to have a different workflow for each of these things which on some level is you know is more work you're you're doing double duty but the the rewards that come with it are worth it I think yeah the way that we're talking about that is we say it's like the folks on audio have so much more context and patience so they have they tend to have more context on you on what you're talking about whereas YouTube you know they're they're half paying attention it's most most the viewers are going to be people that have never heard of you before so they don't have much context around what we're talking about and to your point they really don't have a lot of patience was there some point where you intentionally started to try to drive growth on the audio side or did that happen naturally as you published the show and grew it on YouTube classically I didn't pay attention till we were already doing well yeah um we broke into the top 100 tech podcasts in America on Apple podcasts now tech is a arguably we had a leg up because tech is a lot of those podcasts are a little dry and and we bring a little bit of creativity and pizzazz to that yeah we then started paying attention and and then looking at the finish rates and things like that one of the things that about YouTube as well I'll say is with YouTube I really had to get comfortable with the peaks and troughs of it I mean we would put out episodes that would only get 3,000 you know listeners or watchers and other ones that would go like crazy so I think that we haven't had a traditional path of like slow incremental growth we would have get like our John Papsidera episode he's he's the casting director cast Oppenheimer and Yellowstone and Landman and Superman and the Odyssey all of Christopher Nolan's films that episode came out right around the time that Superman was was go it was in production that's now got 200,000 views we got a lot of subscribers and then they kind of dropped off over successive things so like you're having this real approach avoidance thing of being like oh my god we got to hit we got all these subscribers isn't this great and then all those subscribers go I don't know who your next guest is but I don't give a shit and yeah so you're then watching people drop off and you're watching the next video get only 3,000 views and you're like oh my god I'm a failure a flash of the pan and whatever else right and then at the end of I think the the first season of the second season we had Rob Minkoff who directed the Lion King and he was talking about AI and animation and that just hit again and again we had this big bump and I listen I don't know if people just forget to unsubscribe but we had these moments and then some like you know the the John Papsidero episode had another spike a month ago for some reason and I don't know if it's because the trailer for the Odyssey came out we changed some of the the wording in the SEO or where we were kind of like we were talking about the Odyssey and how he works with with Chris Brenolan and then it got another spike audio listeners feel very methodical it feels the way growth is supposed to feel I just imagine you get this little group of people who actually listen and actually care and then they snowball a little bit and that that feels like a much more linear much more sustainable relationship with the audience yeah that that checks out entirely audio listeners are much more routine the hard part with an audio listener is getting on to their tiny grocery shelf of shows that they listen to on a weekly basis that's the hard part it grows way slower but it's so much more powerful like it their hard thought but they are among the most loyal and valuable whereas on YouTube it's much quicker to grow and get a show off the ground but to your point it's kind of like every single episode is a new attempt to get people to pay attention which can be exhausting but again like the way that you wound up doing it is exactly what we recommend where it's like look let's YouTube has the strongest growth engine let's get good at that and start getting attention there and start getting subscribers there and many times you just focus 100% on YouTube get growth there then turn and look your audio has grown it just it just works out that way and then you get to a point where you can okay now let's flesh this out let's consider the two different audiences and how they listen and that's exactly what you've done and just once again without gushing I'm just so impressed and congratulations man thank you yeah it's and then it does snowball as well with guests I mean so many of our original guests are people I've known or worked with and I'm very lucky that you know they've gone on to do incredible things since we work together and now I'm reaching out to new people and they get the metrics of the show they can see that we are hovering around constantly between the 50 and 30 on the top tech podcasts in America on Apple podcasts so they can see that that's something they can check on their phones to see that it's real they can see that the follower count on YouTube it all just validates and I think that's really great awesome orlinda well this is this is the unfair essay question at the end of the SATs that I totally didn't prepare you for but if you were so there are business owners who are listening to this who might have already invested in their podcast maybe they've tried some stuff they haven't seen the growth yet having been on the other side of a tremendous year of growth with the show and what it's done for your business is there any piece of advice that you would have for them I don't know I just think that that zero to one thing is the most important thing start just start you will not be good at so many parts of it when I look back on my first episodes I had a a tonal problem with my intros I mean not a problem I thought they were great at the time but now looking back I now have when I do an intro I'm at a certain level that's inviting interesting not too much whatever else but still enthusiastic I had one in fact the John Papsidera episode and Kim Winter the casting directors of Superman it sounded good on audio but the video is be going what does it mean to cast that performance and cast it beautifully and memorably today I sit down I mean it was like the real like BBC nature document version of an intro you know now I look back and I cringe at that but I thought it was fine at the time so there are things that you're you don't even know yet the things you're going to be embarrassed you can't even possibly know yeah so I would actually take that and kind of flip it and say like immediately I think of my first two episodes of my Philadelphia podcast in May of 2018 and how like after a year and a half of podcasting went back and listened to it and was like oh my gosh I sound so bored like it like it's like how on earth did I think this was good and I think like the message there is get some feedback from somebody does not have to be me but a lot of times business owners podcasters are like I just don't understand why this isn't working it's because you just don't understand which parts aren't there yet which in retrospect you'll look back and be like oh of course but it's just about getting feedback so you know whether it's a coach whether it's just like friends or something like that feedback is everything I mean the other advice I would get is get the absolute best guess you can I know it sounds weird but because obviously they would be right but I think that you have probably worked with or went to high school with or whatever you know especially in those early episodes I actually passed for some of my early guess because I was so rubbish at it but but I do think that you're likely to know somebody get some people in those early episodes that but but try really to get the most senior people you can get some of the people who also taught me how to do it is hypercube is a company that's our you know one of our parent companies and they have an energy podcast and they get the most senior people in the world of energy and a lot of those people don't get the opportunity to talk on podcasts about what they're what they do every day you know and that drives real business for them it the follower count and everything else you can be a niche subject success and then you get to a place where I reached out to somebody being who I didn't know being like gosh I hope they come on the podcast and that person said I'm already a subscriber I would love to be on the podcast that was one of my better moments in this whole thing because I was like oh my god I don't like I still have that thing of when reaching out to a new person I'm not sure they're gonna want to we're gonna care or whatever else that was huge for me you know people going oh I'm already a subscriber I already listened you you actually interviewed a friend of mine so I subscribed that then you forget that your net that if you get good people that network and again we make sure that they put it out on their socials we make sure they tell everybody they know because then if we accidentally hit one of them up or what's also happened is that they've said you know who you should talk to is my friend over here the the network of people that you're talking to is is for me my greatest asset well Orlando we were right at time you've been so generous sure I hope I didn't so much too much hope I was useful no it was so good man it's so exceeded what I was hoping for really really thank you so much just I can't thank you no it's I can't thank you enough you really and like I said if you look at today's episode you will see that I was listening back I didn't have the ability to you know I didn't have the ability to do anything at all just because of the time realities of it but it stayed in the back of my mind I kept thinking we've got to do this this is important yeah and as it became possible and as we grew as Kubrick Labs and started having more work than we know what to do with and we grew and monetized the podcast I now have the resources and I also know assuredly those resources are well spent on the podcast that's that's the key shakes thing is you can always waste revenue building a podcast knowing that it's a it's a funnel and knowing that it's it's delivering for the business is so right it'll generate ROI and you can use that ROI to then fund the improvements to the show but get the show growing first before we invest too much total couldn't agree yeah awesome well thank you very much really enjoyed and and you know I'm so appreciative of of all the the work we did together