Aligning Your Podcast Growth With Your Business with Reuben Swartz

Have you noticed that expertise podcasts—even from “celebrities”—tend to have an arc? They grow, they evolve, they might even shrink or pause for awhile and at some point they end.

When Sales for Nerds host Reuben Swartz put his highly rated 100-episode podcast on hiatus with an intriguing announcement, I invited him to the show to talk about:

Why he hit the pause button on Sales for Nerds.

Where his podcast aligns with his core Soloist business—and where it diverges.

How he thinks about the value of his time and the role his podcast plays in personal learning and driving business.

The organic arc (rise, plateau, fall) his podcast experienced as his business and his goals have changed.

How finishing 100 episodes made him review his experiences and think about what’s next.

LINKS

Reuben Swartz Mimiran | Sales for Nerds | LinkedIn | YouTube (Mimiran) | YouTube (Sales for Nerds)

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Reuben Swartz is the founder of Mimiran, the fun, “anti-CRM” for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He’s also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast.

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

Join the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.

The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

BOOK A CALL WITH ROCHELLE

TRANSCRIPT

Reuben Swartz
00:00 – 00:28
So i dropped an email to jason cohen at wp engine hey jason i got this new concept for podcast i bring a bottle of wine to your office and interview you talk about wine i really like your blog he writes this brilliant blog and i’ve heard you speak at blah blah blah blah blah and I really like what you have to say blah blah blah blah blah blah And I’m also a customer blah blah blah blah blah blah Right? Like this really nice, suck up email. He just writes me back 5 minutes later–you had me at wine, here’s a link to my calendar.

Rochelle Moulton
00:33 – 01:08
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Live podcast, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m so excited to welcome Ruben Swartz to the show. Ruben is the founder of Mimarin, the fun anti-CRM for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He’s also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast. Ruben, welcome.

Reuben Swartz
01:08 – 01:10
Oh, it’s so great to be here, Rochelle. Thanks for having me.

Rochelle Moulton
01:11 – 01:45
Yeah. So we met on your podcast and the sales for nerds podcast, and I’ve been on your email list ever since. Just kind of like to keep tabs on what you’re up to. And then last week I got this email, which with your permission, I’m going to read because it just felt very Ruben and very vulnerable and very true. So I’ll just get to it. When you get this, I’ll be recovering from eye surgery. Nothing terrible, but it’s been an interesting year or so with 1.5 eyes. I won’t get all my vision back in my left eye, but it should be much more functional.

Rochelle Moulton
01:46 – 02:15
While I certainly hope to see better visually, I also try to keep seeing better conceptually. And along those lines, I’m putting Sales for Nerds on hold for a bit. Nothing against the great guests I’ve enjoyed speaking with, but I’m feeling like I’m not offering much that’s new and that putting out new episodes is more for me to say I did it than to offer real value to you. If you think I’m missing something, let me know what you’d like to hear. I’ve got some ideas for a reboot, but I need to go think about it for a minute.

Rochelle Moulton
02:16 – 02:47
So what I so appreciated about that email is that I know exactly that feeling, as does a pretty surprising swath of our fellow podcasters. So I just had to ask you to come on and talk with me about how we manage what I’m thinking of as the arc of podcasting, like how expertise business owners can roll with the different waves that hit our podcasts and our business growth at different inflection points. So that’s the setup. I’m just so glad you said yes.

Reuben Swartz
02:48 – 02:48
Well, it’s great

Reuben Swartz
02:48 – 03:17
to be here. And it’s funny that we’re having this conversation because in some ways I had been feeling this way for a while. And I think like most of us, I’m just kind of stubborn. And I think, well, if you know, if things aren’t going great, that’s fine. You just power through. And then I heard you and Jonathan discussing just ending your podcast. Like it had come to the end of its lifespan and you’d said what you wanted to say and you were going to move on to different things. And I was like, Oh, That’s interesting.

Reuben Swartz
03:18 – 03:53
Maybe I should think about that. And I’ve been sort of thinking about it for a while. And when I started, it was great because every single episode was just so new and so interesting. And I felt like I was learning so much and. a hundred plus episodes in, it’s not that the guests were any worse or better than the earlier ones, but I didn’t feel like I was learning as much. And whether or not that translates to the audience, if I’m not learning as much, then I’m not as excited to be there because I love learning things.

Reuben Swartz
03:54 – 04:40
And so I didn’t feel like I was bringing my best game to my listeners. And for a while I had sort of been thinking, okay, I need some better way of organizing this than just here’s a bunch of random episodes that all have helpful info. I wanted to have themes and I thought about sort of having playlists. So, you know, if you work in marketing, if you’re working on networking, if you’re working on sales, here’s a bunch of episodes you should look into and there’s no good reason i haven’t done that but what i realized later was maybe i want to have sort of like a start to start a new season of the podcast where it’s going to be sort of more serialized content where you want to listen to episode one and it’s going to lead to episode two to episode three and so on and then when you get done with it you’ve gone on this journey and you’ve learned the following things

Rochelle Moulton
04:41 – 04:41
the Netflix

Reuben Swartz
04:41 – 04:43
model. Kind of like that. Yes.

Rochelle Moulton
04:43 – 05:05
Yeah. Okay. So before we go too far with the arc of podcasting, will you talk to us a little bit about how you got here because you operate what I would call a soloist business, but you also decided to develop a product to help solve a very common soloist problem. So talk about, you know, how’d you get here doing this right now?

Reuben Swartz
05:06 – 05:39
With very poor vision and strategic planning would be the short version. I started a business 20 something years ago because I was young and single and didn’t have a lot of expenses and had some savings and I remember thinking if I didn’t do it then I would never do it. Brilliant business plan really. I’ve heard worse. It could be worse. Yeah. And it was a lot of fun, actually. And to be a guy in his mid-20s, flying all over the world, helping these giant companies and working with executives two or three times my age, it was great.

Reuben Swartz
05:39 – 06:29
Something I had never envisioned myself doing. And I learned a ton and I like to think I was very helpful. And then life has its way of intervening because I thought I would do that for a while. you know my thirties i didn’t mean maybe settle down and have some kids want to start gotten all that out of my system and then met my future wife and we had a certain schedule we had to get to if we’re gonna have a family and that kind of threw off my planning and i didn’t wanna travel as much and one thing led to another and i would love to tell you that In the course of my struggles to use the enterprise here we were helping our clients use that i saw the need for a CRM or an anti CRM geared towards the soloist and that’s not what happened at all i literally accidentally started building things to plug into the enterprise tools.

Reuben Swartz
06:29 – 07:02
And then people started asking me for access to them. So I made them from a tool for myself into an app that other people could access. And at the time, it was still mostly like enterprise type clients. And then what I noticed was the enterprise folks would start off really excited. They had good budgets. I was used to working with them. It was all great. But their requirements never ended. They would usually, they would want to bring me in because I’d say, hey, our, our sales teams just, they won’t standardize anything. We need to standardize the way we’re actually presenting stuff to prospects.

Reuben Swartz
07:02 – 07:36
Your stuff is exactly what we need. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We just needed to do the following three extra things. Can you handle that? And I’d say, uh, sure. Okay. We can make it do that. We’ll do that. And then I’d say, okay, everything’s great. We just need to do the following three extra things. And eventually we all realized there was no end to the extra things and that’s why they were using excel because. No one could ever say no to a prospect and say, here’s how we’re going to sell you stuff. If the prospect said, present it like this, they went off and presented it like this.

Reuben Swartz
07:37 – 08:09
And the whole effort to standardize would fall apart. Meanwhile, there were other indie consultants who thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And they didn’t have big budgets. You needed a lot of them to equal one enterprise customer, but they were thrilled. And it was making their lives better in ways that I could personally relate to, because I was doing the same thing. And they started asking for more stuff. I started off just like wanting to know if people had read my proposals. So I figured if I could put the proposal in the cloud, I could know if people were reading it.

Reuben Swartz
08:09 – 08:38
That was sort of the genesis of this crazy journey. So then people said, Hey, the end of my sales cycles, smooth, easy, predictable, love it. What can I do to get more people in the front of the funnel? And I thought, you know, being the techie guy, I’ll just go do some research and say, well, you should use this. And I had one of those moments like you have at the end of the movie where they show you all the clues and suddenly it’s all obvious, but you missed it at the time. I have a lot of those in my life, but because I had tried so many things myself and nothing had really worked well for me.

Reuben Swartz
08:38 – 09:22
And I realized that there were so many things out there, but they weren’t geared towards this tribe. They were geared towards e-commerce type companies where you get an email address and you just Automate the crap out of email marketing or you have a big sales team that’s gonna pound the phones all day and neither of those scenarios applies to the soloist and i thought well wait a second i’ve got this technology to let people share content online and no one someone’s reading it what if we made that into a lead magnet. So instead of having one of those weird pinch and zoom experiences with a pdf you could actually read it on your phone and you could know not just when someone request it but if they look at it again next week next month whatever you have another chance to actually talk to them.

Reuben Swartz
09:22 – 09:48
And so this work well people oh my gosh is amazing i’m finally getting leads off my website. And then I put them on my CRM, which I hate. And if it goes well, then I go into Mimarin and do the proposal. Can you please just make Mimarin do the CRM part? And as you can imagine, I said, no, that would be nuts. I would never do that. And so I kept hearing this from people and I kept saying, that’s nuts. Like the world doesn’t need another CRM. And I would be the last person to build one.

Reuben Swartz
09:48 – 10:18
I freaking hate CRMs. I mean, I’ve literally used dozens of them. And here’s what my, my customers were saying to me that that kind of makes sense is like, that’s why you need to do this because you understand why we hate them so much. And again, looking back, it’s all clear, but at the time I just couldn’t see it. CRMs are built for a VP of sales to track a sales team. And I knew from my consulting days that the sales team doesn’t even like them. Yup. We hated them. They’re in there the whole time.

Reuben Swartz
10:18 – 10:46
They at least know how to use them. The solo consultant who’s maybe in the CRM a few hours a week, if you’re lucky, doesn’t want to think of his or herself as a salesperson, doesn’t go through the formal training or anything like that. They just want to be able to do follow-ups. It’s like, the analogy I like to use is, you’re sick of carrying your groceries back from the grocery store. Someone says you should get a vehicle. And so you ask what you should get. And well, it turns out that there’s a bunch of friendly vehicle consultants.

Reuben Swartz
10:46 – 11:21
And the most popular one says, well, you should get a space shuttle. And then you wonder why taking the space shuttle to the grocery store is even more frustrating than walking home with your groceries, right? Yep. Salesforce. And then someone’s like, oh, yeah, the space shuttle is just way too complicated. what you need is a 747, right? Now we’re at HubSpot. And these are great tools. And there are times when you need a space shuttle or a 747 or whatever it is, but not to go to the grocery store. So that’s sort of the long-winded way of saying, here’s how we ended up building this thing.

Reuben Swartz
11:22 – 11:53
with my customers kind of dragging me, kicking and screaming, because what I realized is we don’t need to keep track of a sales team. We need to create and nurture relationships. And if you’re in a relationship business, you’re in a conversation business, which was very hard for me as an introverted anti-sales techie to accept. And if you’re in a conversation business, you want to do two things. You want to get very specific about who you want to have conversations with, and then you want to have those conversations. That’s it. Like it’s no more complicated than that.

Reuben Swartz
11:53 – 12:02
And the problem is we build up so much paraphernalia around everything that we don’t do those basic things and then it’s really hard.

Rochelle Moulton
12:02 – 12:42
Oh, you are preaching to the choir. I mean, it’s funny because I always associated CRM with relationships because I came out of a big firm when it was all about relationships. We worked with Fortune 500 companies and your job as a person who leads teams is to spider your way through an organization. And the way you do that is by building relationships with people in different functions. But then when all of the sales systems came out, I mean, they made no sense to me because I wasn’t wired that way. But I did run a Fortune 500 company internal consulting group at one point in my career, and they had a rocket ship.

Rochelle Moulton
12:42 – 13:15
And it was fascinating because they had salespeople. They had actual salespeople. And when I was watching them, that’s when it dawned on me like, Oh, I get it. This is just so different than how I think of this stuff. I’m not thinking about tracking deals. I don’t talk about deal flow. Right. Even in a big firm, we didn’t talk about deal flow. We talked about relationships and the name of the client and the name of the company. So yeah. So how long did it take you till you had something that looks roughly like what you’re offering today?

Reuben Swartz
13:15 – 13:47
Well, it’s funny. People always ask that and I say, well, it, how it looks today is different than how it will look in three months and how it looked three months ago. But I think, I mean, it probably took almost a decade from when I started building little tools for myself to when I would say, Hey guys, here’s a CRM for solo people. And it wasn’t that it took a decade of coding to do that. It just was never something that even occurred to me when I started out, which is probably, again, I’m not the most brilliant business visionary to ever walk the face of the earth.

Reuben Swartz
13:48 – 14:02
Because you could have gone and built this in a much shorter amount of time if I had known what I was going to do. It’s not that it’s rocket science in terms of technology or coding. It’s more a matter of carving stuff out than putting stuff in.

Rochelle Moulton
14:02 – 14:33
Well, it’s very organic the way you described it. And that’s what a lot of soloists experience. I mean, even the soloists who come into this with a business plan saying, this is what I’m going to do. It changes like the first year usually. And it changes again, the second year and the third year and the 10th year and the 20th year. So, you know, it doesn’t surprise me is what I’m saying. It’s organic. And I would think that that’s also what’s helped make it more popular now because you get it and you’ve designed it for this specific audience.

Reuben Swartz
14:34 – 14:49
I think that’s so true. Like having a niche. And sort of cutting out the enterprise niche was, was hard. Cause that’s where most of the revenue was coming from. Right. It’s the familiar story, but I was like, I felt like I was always on this hamster wheel trying to make people happy.

Rochelle Moulton
14:49 – 14:50
Yeah.

Reuben Swartz
14:50 – 15:23
And it wasn’t their fault or my fault. It was just like, they would give me the requirements and I would meet them. And then we would realize that those weren’t the actual requirements. And this process kept repeating. Yeah. And that was just frustrating for everybody. Meanwhile, with the other solos, I was like, this is me in a past life. And when I realized that I wasn’t like uniquely stupid, that there’s a lot of us out there that do great work for our clients, but get a little bit tangled up when it comes to business development.

Reuben Swartz
15:24 – 15:37
And that there are reasonable reasons for that, that we can mitigate and allow people to basically make new mistakes instead of the mistakes that I spent years making. That felt like the right mission for me. Got it.

Rochelle Moulton
15:37 – 15:44
So I love to ask guests when they hit their first $100,000 in their business. I mean, do you remember when you hit yours?

Reuben Swartz
15:45 – 16:07
I mean, it was fairly early on because I was working with really big clients and a lot of the projects were six figures. So this would have been early 2000 sometime. Yeah. So you hit the deck running basically. I mean, it didn’t feel like it, that’s for sure. But I guess in some ways, yeah, it could have been a lot worse.

Rochelle Moulton
16:08 – 16:33
Okay, so I just wanted to give our audience or listeners kind of a little background about you and kind of how you’ve gotten here. So I’d love to talk more about the podcast now. So you’ve recorded, I think over a hundred episodes of the Sales for Nerd podcast. When you first started it, like what goals did you have for it in the beginning? I’m just curious if the goals changed over time.

Reuben Swartz
16:34 – 17:39
Well, you’ll be shocked to hear at this point that I did not have a great strategic plan for the podcast. I was doing an annual retreat with some other small business owners. We were sitting around having some drinks before we really got into things. And we were sort of talking about how a younger generation would just like live stream this on YouTube or something and turn it into something that people actually watched and monetize it or whatever. And we were just sitting around like the old people that we were not doing that. And so i thought it the time a bunch of people had suggested that i should write a book and i would get asked to kind of rubin can i take a coffee and pick your brain blah blah blah blah because i had this reputation as somebody who would work with some of the top companies on the planet but could also translate some of that sales and marketing expertise to the solo and small business owners and i really enjoyed that but it wasn’t a great use of my time so i thought i should really figure out how to put this in a book.

Reuben Swartz
17:40 – 17:52
And then I thought, gosh, a book seems like a lot of work. What I should do instead is a podcast. And because it’s my podcast, what I’ll do is I’ll get a bottle of wine and I’ll bring it to the guest’s office and we’ll do the interview and drink the bottle of wine.

Rochelle Moulton
17:53 – 17:54
That’s how that started.

Reuben Swartz
17:55 – 18:25
That’s how that started. And so, you know, of course, like I spent six months, you know, reading about podcasting and audio quality and this and that and the other thing and not actually doing anything. And finally, I remember I literally hit the six month mark from when I had decided to do this. I’m like, this is ridiculous. I’m overthinking it again. So I dropped an email to Jason Cohen at WP Engine. I’m like, Hey, Jason, I got this new concept for a podcast. I bring a bottle of wine to your office, an interview, and we talk about wine.

Reuben Swartz
18:26 – 18:47
I really like your blog. He writes this brilliant blog. And I’ve heard you speak at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and really like what you have to say. And I’m also a customer and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Right.

Reuben Swartz
18:47 – 19:19
And so Jason, I spoke for two hours. We only stopped because we ran out of wine and we had a great time. And the audio quality was terrible. And a lot of things that maybe we would have done differently, but I was like, this is amazing. Right? Like I couldn’t just say, Hey, Jason, can I have two hours of your precious time? But if I say, I’m going to bring some wine, we’re going to talk about stuff and make it a podcast episode. he was super excited. And I thought, this is great. And, and the feedback I got from people was, well, one, you know, you probably need a better microphone, but that was amazing.

Reuben Swartz
19:19 – 19:24
Right? Like I got to hear Jason talk for two hours about all this really cool stuff and it was super helpful. Thank you.

Rochelle Moulton
19:25 – 19:34
So that was your beginning. So how long did it take you to either like get traction or feel like you were making a difference with it?

Reuben Swartz
19:35 – 20:01
I don’t know because I can’t remember how many episodes I put, I like had in the, in the backlog before I launched, I think it was like three or four or something like that. But like within that first week that I launched, I had a handful of people send me an email saying, Hey, thanks. That was really helpful. So, you know, it would have been nice if it was a thousand people or a million people or something like that, but just that it was like more than zero made me feel like I was making some difference.

Rochelle Moulton
20:02 – 20:14
Well, and plus most of us, if we had a million, we’d be like too scared to start, right? When you start and you’re not sure who’s listening and it may be it’s three people or five people or 10 people. I mean, it’s a lot less stressful

Reuben Swartz
20:15 – 20:15
to

Rochelle Moulton
20:15 – 20:17
do that, you know, don’t you think?

Reuben Swartz
20:17 – 20:18
Yeah, that’s very true.

Rochelle Moulton
20:19 – 20:30
So what, actions like, if any, now that I’m listening to you, I’m wondering if you, if you did this, did you do anything to grow your listener base or is it just really organic over time?

Reuben Swartz
20:31 – 21:09
Mostly organic and mostly I just did not do a very good job of this. That’ll be the first thing that I’ll say. One of the problems of being a soloist and being a control freak is just time. So for like for a while I had someone edit the podcast, but then I didn’t necessarily like the way he edited it. So I was going to do it myself. Right. Even though I probably do a worse job, like no. I know. Right. And then, I was always trying to get the guests to help me promote to their audiences, which I think had some impact, but not as much as I was hoping.

Reuben Swartz
21:09 – 21:48
And one of the things that I realized, don’t worry, I’m gonna do a great job promoting this episode, Rochelle. This does not apply to you. But at some point you kind of get sucked into a vortex of podcasting and you literally can’t promote every episode that you guest on the way you might like. Yeah. Right. Which you probably appreciate because you do a lot of podcast episodes as well. And some of the guests that I have on the show, it was like, they’re super fricking busy. Like they have a million other things going on. promoting even their own appearance on Sales for Nerds is really not a high-value activity for them.

Reuben Swartz
21:49 – 22:00
Exactly. So I’m very open to ideas on what I should have done better. I think I was also really late getting things to YouTube, like doing video.

Rochelle Moulton
22:00 – 22:06
You think that makes a difference with your audience? I think it can depend on the audience for you too.

Reuben Swartz
22:07 – 22:42
What I hear is that it is now the leading place for people to consume podcasts. I don’t know how that cuts across different demographics. But then I remember when I did finally get to YouTube, at the time, the podcast host I was using didn’t split off the video and the audio. So then it broke my Spotify feed. And so then people who were listening on Spotify were annoyed and some of them were like, well, I thought you just stopped. So little silly things like that, that are kind of unforced errors that maybe if, if the podcast was a higher priority, I would have caught sooner.

Reuben Swartz
22:42 – 22:49
Or if I had someone doing it for me, they would have caught sooner that we’re just kind of like, you know, shooting myself in the foot.

Rochelle Moulton
22:49 – 23:20
You know, it’s interesting when you talk about either guesting on somebody else’s podcast or the guest on yours, and the guest promotion is really interesting. And some of the things I’ve learned is that usually it’s the opposite of whatever you think is going to happen. So you have like a famous person on your episode. And so you figure they’re not going to promote it at all, but everybody’s going to come to you to hear them. Like when we had Seth Godin on TBOA, that was always, in fact, I think his first appearance was our number one rated episode.

Rochelle Moulton
23:21 – 24:05
You know that that’s going to happen. We also don’t expect him to go out and promote it, although he did. In his last book, he not promoted it, but he put it on his list of guests in some special articles. But then what I found interesting is I’ve had guests who are like mini celebrities in a particular niche and they did absolutely nothing to promote their episode. And they weren’t enough of a celebrity to jack. listeners on my end, so it was like neutral. So I’d get like an average number of views. And then I had some people that nobody’s ever heard of before who had hugely listened to episodes because they had such a good, engaged group of people that follow them, usually on LinkedIn.

Rochelle Moulton
24:05 – 24:15
It’s usually a LinkedIn piece versus anywhere else. So yeah, I mean, I think some of the things we sort of think of logically when we start a podcast wind up not to be true.

Reuben Swartz
24:16 – 24:22
Yeah, that’s a great point and such a great guest. I’ve tried to get him on Sales for Nerds and haven’t had success, but maybe at some point.

Rochelle Moulton
24:23 – 24:41
Well, what we did is we asked him right when we started and he kind of laughed without saying he was laughing. And he said, okay, after you’ve gotten 100 episodes under your belt, then reach me again. So we did. And he said, a promise is a promise. And so he did our either 100th or 101st episode, something like that.

Reuben Swartz
24:41 – 24:42
Maybe i’ll try that

Rochelle Moulton
24:44 – 24:59
it’s worth a shot it’s worth a shot so with the podcast you didn’t have a specific goal when you started it do you see the podcast is helping to grow your business or is it is it still about i want to learn something and then teach it to other people

Reuben Swartz
25:00 – 25:15
i guess i want to think of those two. circles as overlapping. And probably part of the problem was it wasn’t growing the business directly enough for me to want to devote the time.

Rochelle Moulton
25:15 – 25:16
Yeah.

Reuben Swartz
25:16 – 25:48
And so I love teaching. I love just being helpful. but it’s kind of like that email you read. Like there are certain things that I’ve, I’ve just had to be very conscientious about where my limited time is going. And so I’m trying to figure out a way to do it where, you know, I don’t want the podcast just to be an ad for my business cause that’s going to suck for everybody. But at the same time, can I align it properly? So it’s going to attract the right people and some amount of those people are going to want what I actually have to offer.

Rochelle Moulton
25:48 – 26:16
Okay. That helps me understand where your head was at because when we had the business of authority, that was exactly the place I was at in my head at that point. You know, we were 325 plus episodes in and I just felt like we were rehashing things we’d said before and sometimes not as well as we’d said it the first time. I mean, there were a few times we’d finish, we’d hit end and we’d go, you know what? I think we said that better when we did this before. Yeah, you can get to that point.

Rochelle Moulton
26:16 – 26:33
I like to think it’s on us to decide when we’re being helpful as well as make the assessment that you did about is this helping my business directly or indirectly? What role does it play? And is it worth the amount of time and energy that I’m spending on it?

Reuben Swartz
26:34 – 26:34
Right.

Rochelle Moulton
26:35 – 26:47
So it’s interesting because even with this podcast, I’m not quite 60 episodes in as we speak, and I’ve already had several inflection points. So I changed the name from Soulless Women to The Soulless Life.

Reuben Swartz
26:48 – 26:48
I

Rochelle Moulton
26:48 – 27:36
started adding some new content around transitions, which had never been a theme of mine before. And I toyed with stopping it. I mean, I talked about this in a solo episode, but I’d been moping around, just kind of disgusted with everything that was going on after the election. And I was just having trouble getting excited about anything other than serving my one-to-one clients. It was like, I don’t know if I have anything to say. I don’t know. And then my moxie just came roaring back once I made the connection, like duh, between owning a successful solo expertise business and having agency for everything that’s coming, the fights that are coming, the economic challenges, you know, that having vibrant businesses gives us the wealth and yes, power to make the changes we want to see in the world.

Rochelle Moulton
27:37 – 27:56
And so I got excited again. Because I love helping smart people build expertise businesses. And I just completely re-engaged. It’s like a switch turned for me. So I’m just curious, like, does that align with what happened for you at all? Or did you see sort of a different arc in between episode one and 100?

Reuben Swartz
27:57 – 28:26
There was definitely an arc. When I started, I was learning, I feel like, a lot. Not that I want to still be learning, but I felt like as I accumulated wisdom through my own life and through the other guests, the incremental learning that I got in each episode tended to diminish depending on the topic. And this sounds like a silly thing, but I get so many pitches for guests, mostly from people who seem to have done a keyword search on sales.

Reuben Swartz
28:27 – 28:27
Yeah.

Reuben Swartz
28:28 – 29:30
And then they pretend that they love it and that they listen to things and it’s great when as far as I can tell, they just did a keyword search. And it’s fine like it doesn’t take that long to delete an email but it was just sort of i was actually just writing a post about this today is like this notion of the scam economy of people pretending things like not advertising but lying and there’s something about that that even if you. Delete the email it sort of like it corrodes your faith in society and i think some of that you know you talk about the election some of that goes to the very top of society and trying to figure out what to do about that but it’s not just a matter of do i like this policy or that policy it is what do you do when there are psychopathic liars in charge of things that’s not the right example for everyone else right like When the Nigerian print scam is coming from the Oval Office, what are you going to do about that?

Reuben Swartz
29:30 – 29:46
That’s a tricky question. A lot of it felt to me like, I’m not sure if my podcast is really rising to the moment. And it’s nice to hear that you’ve worked through some of these issues and come out reinvigorated on the other side.

Rochelle Moulton
29:46 – 30:26
Well, it probably helps that I’ve worked in organizations. And when I did big firm consulting, I worked with organizations that were run by psychopathic sociopaths, or however you said it. So it’s like, for me, the soloist life is a way not to have to really deal with those people. Because if they’re your clients, you can say buh-bye. You can’t always do that as easily with a job job. Running your city or your state or your country is another thing entirely. But the conclusion I came to is that we have agency. And as long as we’re making money in our businesses and we’re helping people, we have economic power and we have leadership power.

Rochelle Moulton
30:27 – 30:55
And that doesn’t mean that somebody is going to listen to my podcast and go, oh, great, that’s how we need to fix this country, because that’s not what I’m going to talk about. I mean, that’s not my area of expertise. Nobody wants to hear me talk about that. But I will recognize that the times have changed, and we need to rise above that. I would just hope for your sake, Ruben, that you don’t let those kinds of experience with, and I’m just talking about people that say they want to be on your podcast, and they lie.

Rochelle Moulton
30:55 – 31:14
that to let that get to you because there’s always going to be people like that. But there are good people out there and that’s what we have to do is kind of swat the flies away and bring the other the good people in close to us because those are the people that are going to make the difference moving forward. The liars never win in the long run.

Reuben Swartz
31:15 – 31:15
No, that’s a great point.

Rochelle Moulton
31:16 – 31:34
We’re in a unique time. Let me ask you this. So what’s next for you? I mean, I know that you said you’ve got some ideas for the podcast. Maybe it’s not dead. I don’t know what your thinking is. But I know you’re doing some workshops and you’re doing some teaching. So tell us kind of what you’re going to be up to next.

Reuben Swartz
31:34 – 31:57
Well, we’ve already established, I have a pattern of not necessarily having the best strategic foresight. But what I want to do with the podcast is have seasons. I have 100 plus episodes and they’re all just kind of jammed in there. And yeah, you can click on different tags and see ones that relate to marketing or whatever. It’s like spinning a roulette wheel in terms of what topic you’re going to get next.

Rochelle Moulton
31:57 – 31:58
Mm-hmm.

Reuben Swartz
31:58 – 32:32
And that’s fine. But I feel like it doesn’t help if you’re trying to build skills one on top of the other. If you’re a listener, if you’re in my target audience, which I think is very much your target audience as well, if you listen to episodes 1 to 100, you would never want a book organized that way. It’s just random chapters thrown together. And so, what I want to do is have seasons that focus on a particular topic. And I don’t know how long they’re going to be. They could be five episodes or 10 episodes or 20 episodes or something like that.

Reuben Swartz
32:32 – 32:52
Or all of the above. Or all of the above. And you listen to those in sequence and you come away saying, Okay i went from not knowing a whole lot about say how to do networking effectively to now i can network really solidly and i can go apply these lessons as i listen to them and come out the other end of the season in a different place.

Rochelle Moulton
32:53 – 32:57
It sounds almost like a workshop, like a one-way workshop, right?

Reuben Swartz
32:58 – 33:24
Yeah. It’s sort of like a combination of a podcast and a course and workshop, something, right? Yeah. I want people to not just be as entertaining as you and I think these subjects are. Most people are probably going to pick Netflix instead of- If they just want pure entertainment, we have to give them something that they’re actually going to do differently. At least that’s my goal.

Rochelle Moulton
33:24 – 33:36
I love that. I think we assume we’re Netflix at our peril. So Ruben, if you could go back to who you were when you first started your business, what’s the one thing you’d advise him to do?

Reuben Swartz
33:37 – 33:38
Be myself. Do

Rochelle Moulton
33:39 – 33:41
you want to say more about that? Did you feel like you weren’t at the beginning?

Reuben Swartz
33:42 – 34:31
Yeah, I felt like I was always trying to be the version of myself that other people expected. More business savvy, more sales savvy, older. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to be savvy and learn things and be the best version of yourself. You totally should. But you can only actually be yourself and trying to be someone else is exhausting. And it causes problems in relationship businesses. Even if you’re not doing it to be deliberately deceptive, if you’re not being true to yourself, people pick up that something’s wrong. And I think what I didn’t realize was, you know, if people wanted, when I was 25, if they wanted a 55 year old McKinsey partner in a $2,000 suit, they were going to hire the 55 year old McKinsey partner.

Reuben Swartz
34:31 – 34:58
Like there was no way for me to like out McKinsey, McKinsey, right? The people who didn’t want that, who wanted me because they wanted a different perspective. They wanted to hire someone like me. So I should just let them pick and make it very clear what I was all about. And now that I’m getting closer to that other age, I still don’t have a $2,000 suit, but now I’m the middle-aged guy. What are you going to do? Let me be myself. I’m not going to pretend to be the 22-year-old anymore.

Rochelle Moulton
34:58 – 35:22
You know, I think that’s the hardest thing when we’re in our twenties is to, for most of us is to be ourselves because we look at all the people ahead of us and we think we have to be like them. I mean, if you saw pictures of me in my twenties, like I had helmet hair, like I was trying to look like I was 47. I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s what we do, but yeah, I think that’s great advice. You know, lean into being you.

Reuben Swartz
35:23 – 35:55
And I think that’s true. I think there is something about being in your twenties, especially in the professional world that brings that out in a lot of us, but especially a lot of people even later in life, maybe they’re a little bit more sure of who they are socially, but they’re just starting their, their business career, right? They just left corporate. They’re starting a solo practice and suddenly it’s like, Oh, but I’m not Rochelle. I’m not. Jonathan who am i and so don’t feel like you should pretend to be that person be you. and be very clear about who that is.

Reuben Swartz
35:56 – 36:05
And we talked earlier about being very clear about who you want to talk to. And some of that is about who you are, right? Who are the people that you mesh well

Reuben Swartz
36:05 – 36:05
with?

Reuben Swartz
36:06 – 36:31
Instead of like, I have to kiss everyone’s ass. You said something great about how when you’re a solo and if you really don’t like a client, you just fricking fire the client, right? Yeah. Bye-bye. Same thing. There are going to be prospects that you’re just like, I don’t like this person. I don’t want to be in a room with them for another hour, let alone six months. So just say we’re not a fit and move on. Right. You have the power to do that. And it’s amazing. Perfect.

Rochelle Moulton
36:31 – 36:38
Ruben, we’ll be putting all sorts of links to you and your content in the show notes, but where’s the best place for people to learn more about you?

Reuben Swartz
36:39 – 37:05
You can find more about the CRM at memorand.com, M-I-M-I-R-A-N.com. You can listen to all the back episodes of Sales for Nerds at salesfornerds.io. You can find videos about the CRM and Sales for Nerds episodes on YouTube. And of course, you can find me on LinkedIn. I think if you do a search for Ruben Schwartz. If I’m not the only one who comes up, I’m one of the really few ones and it should be pretty obvious. Yes, you are actually easy to find.

Rochelle Moulton
37:06 – 37:21
So Ruben, thank you. I appreciate your coming on the show. I really appreciate how vulnerable you were both in the email that started this all out, but just here, you know, you’re Ruben and I really appreciate you. Thank you.

Reuben Swartz
37:22 – 37:27
Well, thanks so much for having me. It’s been such a pleasure. I love your podcast and it’s such an honor to be a guest.

Rochelle Moulton
37:27 – 37:34
Oh, thank you. Okay, that’s it for this episode. I’ll see you next time on The Soloist Life. Bye-bye.