Episode 274 with Michael DeAloia: Mastering Small Business Growth

My guest for this episode of the Ready Yet podcast is Michael DeAloia, CEO of Evergreen Podcast. Join us as we discuss:

• Overcoming challenges in transitioning from radio shows to podcasts
• Scaling a podcasting business and building a strong team
• The importance of hiring intellectually curious individuals with diverse experiences
• Valuable lessons in business strategy and adaptability
• Balancing personal and professional priorities in the fast-paced world of podcasting

GUEST RESOURCES

https://www.linkedin.com/in/techczar/

https://evergreenpodcasts.com/

https://about.me/techczar

https://www.facebook.com/techczar

Forge Your Path. Unlock Your Power. Unleash Your Potential.

Learn more about Erin Marcus
Join us on Facebook
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube

Are you ready to let go of living in reaction mode, filled with “have-to’s” and “should’s” and move into what you want to intentionally create more for yourself?

🌱 Join us in the Untamed Success community as we embrace the messy middle of embracing what is possible. Let’s do it together! 🌱

Transcript

Episode 274 with Michael DeAloia: Mastering Small Business Growth

Transcribed by Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. Welcome. Welcome to this episode of the ready at podcast. I'm excited because fresh off of international travels and getting back to his daily routine here. I can't wait to have this conversation. My guest today, Mr. Michael D'Eloia. Did I say that correctly? That 

Michael DeAloia: is spot on. That's perfect.

Erin Marcus: pride myself in trying to get that right for people. I'm excited. Anything but French. I've come to learn. Anything but French. And I have Katya, I can say her first name. It's over from there. But I'm excited about this conversation that we're going to have today because it's a topic you and I have talked about before.

Erin Marcus: But before we dive into it, why don't you tell everybody a little bit who you are and what you do? 

Michael DeAloia: Certainly. Again, Michael D'Eloia, I'm the CEO of Evergreen Podcast based in Cleveland, Ohio. I think we've got a pretty cool story of, Going from startup to emergent growth company. We started in 2017. It was myself and two interns and 10 terabytes of old radio shows that our investors wanted to turn into a podcast.

Michael DeAloia: And that was our humble beginnings. Under the brand name at the time? Front porch people. 

Erin Marcus: Oh, nice. 

Michael DeAloia: Because the investor had this thought, like they could turn essentially the old style of 1930s radio programming the family. Fire, gather around. 

Erin Marcus: Yeah. 

Michael DeAloia: And listen to the podcasts. And you, we quickly learned that's not how people listen to podcasts.

Michael DeAloia: It's a very singular earbuds. 

Erin Marcus: Earbuds are a thing. . That's right. 

Michael DeAloia: It's a solitary personal thing. And then we switched to evergreen, but that first year, I think we did four podcasts, originals, 18, 000 downloads. It was not a market shaking entrance, but yeah, last year we ended up doing 310 shows, 32 million downloads, we're already past the 20 million mark this year.

Michael DeAloia: So I feel like we've got. A lot of runway underneath us. We've grown from those three initial employees to now we've got close to 30, 20, somewhere in there. We bought our own radio station, old radio station here in Cleveland. We've turned it into a podcast thing. Paradise, as it were. 

Erin Marcus: If there is such a thing, you've got it.

Michael DeAloia: Yeah, we have it. It's just a really cool environment to live, work, and play. And we're going to continue to grow. We've announced, since last August, six acquisitions. We finished our seventh before I left on my international travels. We haven't announced that yet, but it's, it was we, but I can tell you 

Erin Marcus: tell me just between us chickens.

Michael DeAloia: Yeah. Yeah. So the independent podcast network we acquired that like I said, just a few days before I left. And then we're working on arguably our largest acquisition, which will announce in mid August. It'll be another podcast group out of California that will double. Our revenue and we'll double our downloads.

Michael DeAloia: And so it's just been an amazing journey of a very humble beginnings. You 

Erin Marcus: can't get to 32 million. If you don't start somewhere, I think that's too many people, humans have this all or nothing thought processes. If I can't be all the things all at once, I won't be anything, but you that's not how it works.

Michael DeAloia: No, I'm a firm believer. Like just start, I hear people all the time with these big ideas and plans and just get it going, just start with something, take that first step, you'd be surprised. Now it's been a seven and a half year journey for us. So we got a little traction and we've learned a lot along the way, and that's all part of the process, right?

Michael DeAloia: But our management philosophy is, Hey. We're going to fumble, stumble and bumble our way through it until we figure it out. 

Michael DeAloia: Right. 

Michael DeAloia: And that's how, I think that's how most good companies start, which is the mindset of, Hey, let's just trip 

Erin Marcus: because they think there's a difference. between knowing you can deliver on a promise.

Erin Marcus: Don't screw that up. Know that you can deliver on your promise. And when you're not confident, keep your promises small, and as you get more confident, grow your promises with it. But how you grow your own business, We never know what we're doing. That was the running joke between the woman who was my assistant for years.

Erin Marcus: Are we supposed to know what we're doing? No? All right, just checking. Not your promise statement, but everything else about your business gets figured out along the way. 

Michael DeAloia: You'll always be hit with those unique situations regardless, right? That they're going to call into question how you're doing things.

Michael DeAloia: But I agree. I we really want Employees who are intellectually curious. That's our biggest thing that we look for. And the second thing we look for is, do you have a side gig? And by that we mean, are you in a band? Do you, are you in local community theater? Do you like to hike? Do you like to travel?

Michael DeAloia: These are things that are important to us because they all lead to one thing inevitably, which is we're all looking for a solution, whether it be bespoke or something that we can repeat. And I want a team behind us, our investors who. Consult problems for our partners and, and our listeners.

Michael DeAloia: And that's ultimately our guide as to how to grow this business. 

Erin Marcus: I did the same thing. It's funny that you said that. Cause I, I did the same thing when I was in corporate The long story short was we, I ended up in charge of a new department. I was the department for a long time major accounts. Part of what I did was help a company go from a situation where we were just working one on one with individual financial planners, and then we created this situation where we were acquiring accounts and once.

Erin Marcus: I was on the forefront of doing that. That was my job here. Let's change everything about the business go. And when I got to the point where I needed help, so many people in the industry were available and my boss is like, what about this person? What about that person? I'm like, I don't want somebody's old version of doing it.

Erin Marcus: And I hired this guy right out of college. I hired this guy right out of college and I said to, by the third interview, I'm like, okay, I know you look good in a suit, we've seen the suit, just show come now, show, I just want to see you. And I ended up hiring him because of the stories he told me when we were just hanging out about the six months that him and two friends Spent after college, traveling through Europe.

Erin Marcus: That's why I hired him. Because those stories told me he could figure things out. He wasn't scared of not knowing what was going on. He wasn't scared of talking to other human beings who were different from him. It told me so much about his willingness. to figure it all out. And I wanted that so badly over somebody's old version of how it's supposed to go.

Michael DeAloia: There's a blend there, right? Between experience, meaning I've got a CV and experiences, which are really the case studies of how we get through life. And we tend a little bit more on the experiences side. And mainly because that's the business we're in. We're, you're listening to stories or experts who are thought leaders and are giving you knowledge, the experience, that experience, that is really going to drive you.

Michael DeAloia: So yeah, that's, it's a really interesting thing, isn't it? That I think most of corporate America for years was looking for people with the long term experience. I will say the people that we hired, the very few that we've hired based upon the experience, not the experiences. Those are the ones who didn't last very long at Evergreen.

Michael DeAloia: They really didn't because they were so industry singular focused that anything that would dislodge their sense of what is. 

Erin Marcus: They didn't know what to do with that. 

Michael DeAloia: No, absolutely not. You're correct. They don't know what 

Erin Marcus: to do with it. It 

Michael DeAloia: shattered their whole being. 

Erin Marcus: It's not the entrepreneurial journey that they're supposed to be.

Erin Marcus: I don't think I'd start the day without it, my whole being, being shattered. And having to figure it out. But, you mentioned Where you started out to where you are now, and I'm on the cost spin in the process of iterating what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. And I'm curious, because I think to go from 3 to 30, it's not seamless, it's not linear.

Erin Marcus: I know very few entrepreneurs with seamless linear stories. So how do you know when it's time to make a decision? Do I go left or do I go right? Do we say yes or do we say no? Do you have a framework, a instinct? Like, how do you know when to iterate? I know this is like a simple one sentence answer type of question.

Erin Marcus: It's go on and on. 

Michael DeAloia: That, that's a very telling question only because We're going through significant reiterations of evergreen internally, for the most part, I think externally, we project a certain brand or image and that is stuck and is growing, but internally, we're at an inflection point where we've grown so fast that the growth.

Michael DeAloia: And by the way, growth always highlights your weaknesses. 

Erin Marcus: Oh yeah. 

Michael DeAloia: And we've, we outgrew our financial capabilities internally. And we've very similar on the sales side. So we needed to invest heavily in those two elements. So we're doing a net suite and a HubSpot implementation at the same time.

Erin Marcus: Oh, fun. What could possibly go wrong? 

Michael DeAloia: Almost everything. 

Erin Marcus: That 

Michael DeAloia: was mine. See, that's the brilliant ideas I've come up with. 

Erin Marcus: Oh my gosh. 

Michael DeAloia: And somehow the investors agreed to this much to our chagrin. So does the 

Erin Marcus: bandwidth mean anything? 

Michael DeAloia: My feeling on that is I only know one speed and that's the speed of blur.

Michael DeAloia: And if we're going to do it, we're just, we've got to figure it out. It has been chaotic. On the financial side of the house, I think every penny had always been accounted for. The concern was it in the right bucket? We'd gone through a number of bookkeepers and were they doing it on the straight, not the straight and narrow in the bad sense, but in the sense of, were they following the right procedure and process every month?

Michael DeAloia: Through these changes. And of course the answer is no. And we wanted to restate some things as we get ready for going out to raise capital. So that was pretty critical. And that's been a drag for me because the detail that you got to go through. 

Erin Marcus: And it's weighted. 

Michael DeAloia: It is 

Erin Marcus: that what you're talking about.

Erin Marcus: I think that's one of the it's one of my biggest challenges. Also, there's a period of waiting a period of gestation a period of I've done what I need to do. And now I have to let it sit. And stop oomphing with it so that it'll can work. I suck at that because it's hard. There's no action involved. 

Michael DeAloia: But luckily we were able to hire a team who are acting as interim CFO controller and bookkeeper.

Michael DeAloia: These are magicians and the financial clarity that we're starting to see has really been of significance. And the same thing is happening on the sales side where anecdotally you could see things happening. And there was always the theory in the room while things were moving one way or the other, but now we're getting clear evidence as to where we're marching in terms of the sales efforts and where we need to focus.

Michael DeAloia: And it, it challenges conventional wisdom on the sales side. And I always note to people like once it becomes conventional wisdom, it's wrong. Yeah. Cause it, it has this long journey to get you to a specific point in time and everything by that at that point has changed. 

Erin Marcus: Yeah. 

Michael DeAloia: So it's really It's given us some disequilibrium.

Michael DeAloia: We're off balance right now, internally, but it's all for the common good of we need to have enterprise level systems and procedures in place that when we do raise the money and we've gone through significant growth, but the idea is let's jack it up. There's a 

Erin Marcus: difference between growth and scale. I think that's what great growth is.

Erin Marcus: To me, growth is addition and scale is multiplication, and you can grow through hustle and grind and grit. You, if you try to scale from those places, you're on shaky foundation. 

Michael DeAloia: That is very illuminating and I agree with you 100 percent and The growth was getting to the point where we're rattled internally.

Michael DeAloia: Like things weren't working internally on the administrative side. So we just had to, we had to pivot. Now, would I suggest doing all of this at the same time? The answer is probably no. 

Erin Marcus: One of the things that I do, I try to do, and I have different categories and I probably do it twice a year. The way that I see this is your business is this series of systems.

Erin Marcus: And at any given point, one of them, hopefully only one of them, is like an anchor weighing the rest of it down, right? And so you just gotta keep an eye on all the plates. I know you're my age. Remember the thing on the vaudeville shows with the plates spinning? 

Michael DeAloia: Plates spinning on the sticks, right?

Erin Marcus: Without quite so frantic approach. When it's time to grow, iterate, adjust, do the things that you're doing when one of those categories is holding the rest of it back.

Michael DeAloia: And I don't want that in 2025, 2025 is really, I don't want to put too much stress on it, but it's probably the most critical year in our development as a company. And it's really going to set the groundwork for where we're going to go in the industry. The acquisitions that we're bringing on, there are certain individuals that we targeted for those acquisitions.

Michael DeAloia: We're going to be moving over into unique slots that are going to, the theory is they're going to help propel us. And and it's going to give us a geographic entrance into a key market for us that I think will help on the sales side too. So we just got to be ready. And I have told the investors and the management, the executive team, this has not been my most favorite year.

Michael DeAloia: But, it's been a necessary year to get all those details squared away. It's exciting when you're growing, of course. There's no question about that. But my experience, my CV would tell me hey, there's some warning signals. I was feeling them last fourth quarter of last year, going into first, I altered our strategic plan early on, asked for some additional capital to get the financial team in here to do the HubSpot at the same time.

Michael DeAloia: That was a big risk. We finally got our sea legs a little bit. So I asked for even more capital to launch a video on demand service, which we're going through to launch in first and second quarter of next year. So it's a lot of things happening at the same time, but it's all for planning that, laying that foundation, that exponential growth that you were talking about, the scale.

Erin Marcus: And you have to not, like what I watched happen, one of the things, and you can decide how much instinct plays into this. Because I think if you're in business long enough, you do start to feel it. Even if you can't put your finger on it right away, like something's going on, I can feel it. And the idea of there's seasons of business.

Erin Marcus: Winter, fall, like sometimes you have to slow everything down to reassure up your foundation to allow the growth from there. And I think one of the challenges, especially in our world of Instagram and everything's perfect and instant millionaire is to think there's only up multiplied year over year.

Erin Marcus: With no challenge. That's just not how business works.

Michael DeAloia: Business is like a jigsaw puzzle. You hit on something earlier. I think we, I think a lot of people who aren't in business think it's a linear function or that it should be. That's textbook, right? You got the graph and it works straight line. That is not how life works personally or professionally, much less a business, right?

Michael DeAloia: It's like the stock market. It goes up or down every day. I think yesterday was a down day. Forever green, which is like things weren't hitting its mark on a few key things internally. Today, looking a lot more robust, better communication, team's happier, may have been just the Mondays, but yesterday was not, I would say, one of the better days.

Erin Marcus: Here's something else that you're like, without saying it, one of the things that I have seen throw more people is to take a temporary situation and act like it's a permanent situation. You could have, yesterday, let that be completely defeating, it's not working, or truthfully you can, just wait a minute, like maybe you don't even have to do anything.

Erin Marcus: These folks that I see with the wild swings in their business, and the constant frantic energy around it. It's the overreaction to every temporary piece of data.

Michael DeAloia: Yeah, those are probably individuals who should not necessarily be leading the charge or have at least a team around them. A barrier. Yeah, that can manage that swing. Listen, when I was a much younger person, I did have those emotive swings. I was just a very jacked, emotionally person. And with these wild swings, because I was a I start off as a salesperson.

Michael DeAloia: I think most of us do that first entry level job as some sales component or process component. And I was just not a fun person to be around. It's just so emotional up and down. I would say as I've matured and especially here, we've been lucky on a number of fronts. We've got a great investment group, family office who started the business and realized they couldn't, it was beyond their management capabilities.

Michael DeAloia: So they had the capital, let's bring in the team. And I've been able to hand select the people I've really wanted to work with for a long time. Be it, David Moss, who's our chief creative officer. His office is right behind me. 

Erin Marcus: Or the fish that you're pointing to on the wall. 

Michael DeAloia: He's not the fish, but behind 

Erin Marcus: the 

Michael DeAloia: fish.

Michael DeAloia: Gerardo Orlando is our chief content officer. He was running online magazines for years, and before that he was a partner in a law firm. And so he knows media, but He's the steady hand at the till. Like I still have my emotional vacillations oscillations. I should say, David is a creative, so he's got all that energy and joy.

Michael DeAloia: And then of course, Bridget, who was one of the interns that started 

Erin Marcus: being 

Michael DeAloia: able to see her grow into an executive position. We're all owners too, which makes it exciting as we've progressed with the business. The investors have let us, take some equity positions in the company, which has been pretty.

Michael DeAloia: Pretty dynamic. 

Erin Marcus: And what you're saying is the next six figures in your business, the next seven figures in your business, the next leap in anybody's business is who it's not what it's who, right? You need more who's whether that's an investor, whether that's a power partner, whether that's a team member.

Michael DeAloia: I think that's pretty illuminating. We should probably look at it more. Who I am always on a larger scale basis. I would say on a partner basis, we have partner care, we do quarterly sessions with our partners and with our investor, we talk with our investment group a few times a week. So there's a lot of comfort and honesty there which is really important.

Michael DeAloia: And I'm glad we have that regarding our advertisers or listeners. We're probably a little laggard in that regard on the hoop. We recently did a. a survey and our listeners and then we got over 1800 responses, pretty significant. 

Erin Marcus: Yeah. 

Michael DeAloia: Statistically significant, for doing some form of study. And that was just a mind blowing exercise for me.

Michael DeAloia: I'm like, Holy Toledo, like our listeners want to be more engaged with us. In the middle of all that, we decided to swap out. This is one of the, the big changes that you make in the business when you start seeing the data points you mentioned earlier was, all right, let's stop doing audience growth investment where you're doing these major spikes because you're buying ads to get for a new episode or a new show.

Michael DeAloia: And let's start doing more surveys and more actions directed to our listeners. 

Erin Marcus: It's right. It's audience growth versus audience nurture. 

Michael DeAloia: The nurture is a long Run more, they're just, they're going to stick with you longer than the, because what you're doing with the audience buying essentially is you're just doing a Marvel movie opening spike, right?

Michael DeAloia: And how many are going to 

Erin Marcus: stick around? 

Michael DeAloia: Yeah. So we want that sticky audience. It's been a jolt of a change philosophically, and we're trying to get used to it, but it was a necessary thing. And it was, it's just reading the data. 

Erin Marcus: And 

Michael DeAloia: we had these data points. I just couldn't believe it. Are you kidding me?

Michael DeAloia: This many people? Answered our survey. I was like a little incredulous, but now we're working with sounds profitable which is an industry trade magazine. And they do a lot of research. We, one of the things that we acquired was a company called converge, which was in the faith and family podcasting.

Michael DeAloia: We'd like that space. I can't say. As a group, we're super religious. We're probably not more spiritual, but the content really fit the evergreen model of what we're looking for. And it sounds proper within approach. It's Hey, you guys bought this. Would you be interested in doing some insight studies into the faith and family?

Michael DeAloia: audience. So I'm really hoping to kick start that in third and fourth quarter, because Converge to us is one of, going to be the three pillars of our business. Evergreen, Converge, and this third acquisition that I can't talk about at the moment. Those three networks would be the foundational piece of how we go to market.

Michael DeAloia: For the majority of our shows. And so to understand who they are and what, and how they live and how they want to connect with us, it's going to be mission critical and then to take that to our other properties, I think it's going to be very cool. One thing at a time, though, we're going to start with converging.

Erin Marcus: You've learned you're going to do one thing at a time. It's a whole new world. 

Michael DeAloia: Aaron, I love my job. I love the people I work with, but this year has been the most difficult managing component. Like I've never been pushed more on how to manage process before my life. 

Erin Marcus: Here's one of the reasons, my personal opinion on why starting a business is easier than scaling a business because You start a business to do the thing you love.

Erin Marcus: Scaling a business means I'm focused on being a business owner, removing yourself even further in most people's heads from the thing that got you started in the beginning. And it's a completely different skill set, right? You start a business because you love doing the thing, which means you're good at doing the thing.

Erin Marcus: And you're usually the only people on the teams know how to do the thing. Now, the thing you do comes second in terms of the business owner. The business owner's job is vision caster and asset allocation. It's a, right? It's wait a minute, I'm XYZ old. I've been doing this forever and now I got to learn a whole new thing.

Erin Marcus: I don't know how to do those things, right? What got you here won't get you there type of problem. 

Michael DeAloia: Listen, personally, that, that is, it's the trick in the trade. I do get a little nervous at points in time like, how far can I push my skills? Because 

Erin Marcus: Isn't that fun? I love having no idea.

Erin Marcus: Listen, it 

Michael DeAloia: is, it is fun. But it is, I compare my wife and I all the time, she's an attorney. Very risk averse because attorneys by their nature and their job, my boyfriend 

Erin Marcus: is so risk averse. He's in financial services. Right? Same 

Michael DeAloia: right's. So 

Erin Marcus: risk averse, like 

Michael DeAloia: their job is to mute risk crazy, right?

Michael DeAloia: And so I'm the entrepreneur and the, and being an entrepreneur like, like you. Those radical changes. It could be an income. It could be an emotion. It could be in your spiritual well being your physical well being 

Erin Marcus: all of it at once. 

Michael DeAloia: And that's not that. That's not where you want to be. But it can't.

Michael DeAloia: It does happen. The two of us balance each other out for sure. But that context of risk and how to manage your skill base, just as a quick case, case study for years, my wife was very unhappy as being a partner in a law firm. So let's get you out of that. And, but she was fighting it because that's what attorneys do.

Michael DeAloia: They go to the law firm, they work 

Erin Marcus: 10 

Michael DeAloia: years, they become part, and then you become equity partner. And then finally we I navigated to, all right, I'm willing to look at in house. She got a job as a house counsel with a large national construction company. It, her pressure points have gone down, right?

Michael DeAloia: She's happier and she, her big thing was like, how do I manage? Like it's breaking my skill base. Cause I'm going into a corporate setting, which is not a law practice. And they are different. I feel the same way right now. Hey, I'm an entrepreneur. I love building ideas. Love building. That's all I've done for most of my adult life.

Michael DeAloia: I just love building ideas, but there's a threshold of where that skill base is. It's going to hit the ceiling at some point. 

Erin Marcus: But the answer to that is who? 

Michael DeAloia: What's that? 

Erin Marcus: The answer to that problem is find smarter who's. 

Michael DeAloia: I've got a smarter team.

Erin Marcus: The job of the business owner is vision, visionary, vision, caster, and asset allocation, right? So the asset allocation, it's not money, it's money. And. People are a bigger asset than money. So when you reach your threshold of how do I do this, your job is vision caster is that's still fun. That's the puzzle, but implementer and manager go way off your plate.

Erin Marcus: And then you still get to build things. I have a friend who has 10 companies, and he's bought them all, except for his original company, probably, I've known him for nine years. Let's say it took the first two I knew him, we figure out how to do this, because he's become a magician at launching companies.

Erin Marcus: And so what he does is he buys something, he fixes it, he gets it to 80 percent of where it needs to be, and then he puts in the team to do the rest. And he backs off. He, like he tells me, he doesn't even have keys to three of his companies, to the buildings, because that's not his job. His role, this is, when I think about iterating my business, What I've done and some of it might just be age.

Erin Marcus: I'm 54 years old. I only want to do what I want to do. Actually, who am I kidding? This is not a new problem. I only do what I want to do. Finding my version of my business that just speaks more to my strength, what I want to do, because that's the motivation. I'm not doing the bang your head against the wall version.

Erin Marcus: I'm not doing any version that isn't what I think is right for me and what I want to do. It's amazing how much better it all just works out. And the rest is just fine. The who you can do the thing. But how 

Michael DeAloia: long did it take us to get to that point in time? I, 

Erin Marcus: yes, 

Michael DeAloia: it happens for some earlier than others.

Michael DeAloia: I don't know 

Erin Marcus: many people. It happens to real early. I think there's the best thing about getting older is how much I don't care. I think that detachment of what other people think, what other people say, I've never thought more strongly than most of what goes on in this world right now is nothing.

Michael DeAloia: That's a very interesting commentary right there. Because I label it stoicism as the older I've gotten, the more stoic I've become. I can't control things outside of my purview, which is my wife's biggest problem. She wanted to control everything. 

Erin Marcus: Control everything. I've watched three recessions.

Erin Marcus: I've been through the dot com bubble in real estate. I've been in the fight and I was in real estate. I was in financial planning in the financial services in 08, 09 in that complete blow up. And then, everything that's happened post COVID like I've been, there's If anything I know to be true, it's ebb and flow.

Erin Marcus: This too shall pass by the 

Michael DeAloia: way. This is David Mossman, chief creative officer from the 

Erin Marcus: office next door. 

Michael DeAloia: Behind the fish, 

Erin Marcus: behind the fish, the man behind the fish. Great. 

Michael DeAloia: The fish stinks from the head. They say, Hey, that's something. Go back to your 

Erin Marcus: back to your room. Go back to your room. We know that it's all ebb and flow.

Erin Marcus: We know that. 

Michael DeAloia: Yeah, 

Erin Marcus: so I don't get worked up about it anymore. 

Michael DeAloia: I'm the same. I just, I want to do two things in my life right now. Major thing, my family and the business. Those are the two things I'm going to focus on. And anything outside of that is just not going to get inside the inner circle. It's not going to happen.

Erin Marcus: I call it my safety bubble. 

Michael DeAloia: That's a good term, 

Erin Marcus: right? When I'm like what you've been through, when I'm pushing my threshold, I get real black and white about my safety bubble. When I'm in moments where it's taking all my energy and effort to keep Me stable to be who I need to be. I get real black and white about my safety bubble.

Erin Marcus: Who do I talk to about my business? What do I let into my head about anything in the universe? Because I need to, shore up all my strength to put it where it needs to be. 

Michael DeAloia: Yeah. You got to strengthen the resolve. 

Erin Marcus: Exactly. Exactly. I can't wait to see what happens next for you. And I think these are important conversations to have.

Erin Marcus: I really I enjoy having real conversations about what we're all going through with business, as opposed to like Instagram conversations about what doesn't actually happen. If people want to find out more about you, find out everything Evergreen's up to, and find out who the super secret acquisition is by the time this drops.

Erin Marcus: Where can they find you? How can they reach you? 

Michael DeAloia: We're racing against the clock on the acquisition. We got to get it done before. Podcast Movement, which I think is August 19th. 

Erin Marcus: There you go. 

Michael DeAloia: We've got to chase that down. Evergreen. evergreenpodcast. com is obviously where they can find the bulk of our network and our shows and our podcasts.

Michael DeAloia: People are always welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn and Michael the lawyer, but also I'll throw out my email. It's a M D E a L O I a at evergreenpodcast. com. And we do an answer. Like I, I have done a number of podcasts. And I'll get two or three people to email me and we always reach out and it's a lot of times it's not something that I'm expert in.

Michael DeAloia: A lot of it has to do with podcast production and promotion, sales. Luckily we got a team who are more than happy. We are firm believers in knowledge share. 

Michael DeAloia: So when 

Michael DeAloia: people do reach out to us, we're like, here's the book, man, this is what we've learned and things that we would suggest not doing.

Michael DeAloia: Just don't do what I 

Erin Marcus: did. You'll be fine. 

Michael DeAloia: Exactly. And So we're always happy to talk with people and we're obviously at all the large networking events. So podcast movements coming up in August, we'll have a booth there. We actually are doing a seminar, internal seminar to podcast movement on podcasting in the Asia Pacific circle.

Michael DeAloia: So we've got, we have a partner with Nippon broadcasting out of Tokyo, Japan. They're Flying in to be a part of that and some other individuals from Philippines and other places. So it should be a good show. 

Erin Marcus: Thanks. 

Michael DeAloia: Yeah, we're excited about it. And by the way, I Loved being on the show. It was a great afternoon conversation Between two Midwesterners and 

Erin Marcus: we're all very nice.

Erin Marcus: Thanks for hanging out with me and having real conversation. And I can't, like I said, I will make sure all the links are in the show notes. So you're just one click away from everybody. 

Michael DeAloia: What's 

Erin Marcus: next.