[Perspective Series] Boosting B2B Relationships and Revenue Through Podcasting With John Corcoran

John Corcoran is a recovering attorney, an author, and a former White House writer and speechwriter to the Governor of California. Throughout his career, John has worked in Hollywood, the heart of Silicon Valley, and ran his boutique law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, catering to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Since 2012, John has been the host of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where he has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, authors, and entrepreneurs, including Peter Diamandis, Adam Grant, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Marie Forleo.

John is also the Co-founder of Rise25, a company that connects B2B businesses with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners. They help their clients generate ROI through their done-for-you podcast service.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:08] John Corcoran discusses how Rise25 helps B2B businesses build strategic relationships

• [4:50] Common reasons why podcasting succeeds or fails for clients

• [7:54] Top barriers holding people back from launching a podcast

• [9:36] How the Top 100 guest list makes finding podcast guests easy

• [11:51] John highlights how podcasting strengthens relationships around conferences

• [13:09] The early inspiration behind John’s interview-based relationship strategy

• [16:49] Challenges Rise25 faced in scaling customer support and delegation

• [20:05] Tips for communicating effectively with clients based on their personality types

• [25:04] John’s favorite AI tools and how he’s teaching his son to use them responsibly
  

In this episode…

Many professionals understand the value of building relationships to grow a business, but they often struggle with scalable methods that are both authentic and efficient. Podcasting appears attractive but feels overwhelming — time-consuming, technical, and often uncertain in its ROI. So, how can business owners harness podcasting to build meaningful connections and drive growth without getting lost in the details?

John Corcoran, a former White House writer and expert in lead generation, outlines how done-for-you podcasting provides a repeatable system for building strategic relationships. He emphasizes that the key lies in focusing on the conversations rather than obsessing over production. He highlights actionable strategies like creating a Top 100 guest blueprint, overcoming imposter syndrome by forming a podcaster identity, and leveraging each interview to foster genuine partnerships. John also underscores the importance of delegation and training your team to handle client communications effectively.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews John Corcoran, Co-founder of Rise25, about the power of podcasting to grow B2B businesses. John shares how podcasting accelerates relationship-building and strategies to overcome imposter syndrome, improve client communication, and incorporate AI for better customer service.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik! 

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn  

• John Corcoran on LinkedIn

• Rise25

• Guy Kawasaki 

• Jason Swenk 

• "[Perspective Series] Storytelling Secrets for Business Growth With Kyle Gray" on The Customer Wins 

• "[Perspective Series] Scaling a Franchise With Simplicity With Bennett Maxwell" on The Customer Wins 

• "[100th Episode Special] Automating Paperwork Hassles With Cheryl Dillon" on The Customer Wins 

Quotable Moments:

• “A podcast doesn’t take you extra time. It actually saves you a lot of time.”

• “Imposter syndrome is a lack of identity. I didn’t have the identity of a podcaster yet.”

• “Our team could actually do it better and quicker than I could, that I was okay with it.”

• “We try and coach the team and let them kind of take the lead, and it also lets them take ownership.”

• “We don't understand how to teach kids about AI and how our educational system will evolve.”

Action Steps:

1. Start a podcast to build strategic relationships: A podcast creates a platform for high-quality conversations that strengthen ties with clients and partners.

2. Create a Top 100 guest list: Listing 100 ideal guests helps focus outreach and ensures a consistent flow of valuable interviews.

3. Delegate production tasks to your team: Offloading editing and publishing allows you to focus on high-impact conversations rather than technical details.

4. Train your team to handle client support with empathy and speed: Empowering your staff ensures faster response times and more consistent customer experiences.

5. Use podcasting as a business development tool, not just content marketing: Prioritize the relationships formed through interviews over audience size or download stats.

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today is a special episode in my perspective series to bring strategic and different thinking to our audience. Some of my past guests have included Kyle Gray of The Story Engine, Bennett Maxwell of Dirty Dough Cookies, and Cheryl Dillon of my own company, Quik!. Today I'm speaking with John Corcoran, co-founder of Rise25, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.

Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean. Context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit Quick Forms to get started. Man, I'm excited for today's guest.

John Corcoran is a former White House writer, speechwriter, attorney, author, and lead generation expert. Today, he's the co-founder of Rise25, a boutique agency that helps B2B businesses connect with their ideal clients, referral partners, and strategic partners. They do this through a done-for-you lead generation service, a done-for-you podcasting service, and in-person events. John, welcome to The Customer Wins.

John Corcoran: 01:48

Rich, I'm honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Richard Walker: 01:50

Yeah. My pleasure. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I'd love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. John, to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

John Corcoran: 02:08

Yeah, thanks. So we help B2B businesses to build better relationships, build amazing relationships. I'd even say with their clients, their referral partners, and their strategic partners using done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. Basically, what we're doing here today is using a conversation that you record and you publish on a podcast and utilizing that to build great relationships and business.

Richard Walker: 02:32

All right. So in full transparency, John's my guy. He got me into podcasting his company services, and produces our podcast. So I'm a full testimony to what he does. But I didn't want to just bring all that.

I want him to talk about it today. Why B2B? Why not B2C or anything else? Why aren't you building the next Rockstar on Spotify or something like that?

John Corcoran: 02:52

Yeah, it's a great question. One, you know, like they're it's getting more and more difficult and competitive at the top of the charts. So if you want to compete with Joe Rogan or Brene Brown or Mel Robbins or someone who's at the top of the podcast charts, that's harder and harder. It doesn't mean that it can't be valuable for you if you have a B2C company. It just means it's going to be harder and harder to compete in that way.

It also means the ROI takes longer. If you sell a $5 widget, your direct-to-consumer company. It's going to take a lot more of those sales before you chalk it up as a worthwhile endeavor. And whereas in B2B we know we can see with clients one, it's our background, it's the experience that we have, but we all can see people can get a big win out of it. You know, I know you've gotten big wins out of it.

And then it's very easy to say, okay, this is a really good use of my time. You know, I got a big client out of it. I got a big referral out of it. Then it's well worth my time. So that's really why we focus on it.

We do have clients that are B2C, but that they have like a B2B referral partner or strategic partner. And so they use the podcast not to like get the word out about their direct-to-consumer product, but rather they use the podcast to get into conversation with great referral partners and strategic partners. That then leads to big wins for their business, so it can work in that way also.

Richard Walker: 04:12

Yeah, no. We have it's really interesting because I don't go into any conversation expecting to close a deal or to win a customer or to even talk about my product, but it has happened. It has happened with current customers. It's happened with new referral partners and strategic partners of ours that I did not have the expectation of. And it's at the end they're like, hey, we got to talk about this.

And I love to tell people my podcast. All the costs, all the money we spend with Rise25, it's paid for indefinitely by one customer, the first customer who signed up. Awesome. Do you think most of your customers get that experience? Am I rare?

John Corcoran: 04:50

You know, you are very coachable. You know, we were just doing the prep beforehand and you were really like not just following to a t what we advise you to do the way to prepare to approach the time before the interview. But you've taken it even further. I mean, you I was like taking notes on the side here because you were doing some things. I was like, oh, this is a really good I like what he's doing here.

You know, you were boasting. You were telling me about how you're going to take the podcast and slice and dice it and put it into little snippets, and we're going to be pushing those out over the next nine months. I don't say that to my guests, but I was listening to it and I was like, oh, I should say that to my guests because it sounds really cool. It sounds amazing. So, I mean, I can't say that 100% of our clients, it always works because this is a little this is requires a commitment.

It requires you to, you know, to do your business development in a in a different way. And that requires a bit of habit development. And habit development is always hard. You know, we try and make it as easy as possible on our clients by taking everything that can be taken off their plate and handling it for them, so they can focus on the highest and best use of their time, which is having, you know, these great conversations. But yeah, there's plenty of people that struggle with that or that imposter syndrome gets in the way.

And we could make a list of a million different things that gets in the way. But, you know, typically it is, you know, it's either not following the process that we know over combined 30 years of doing this, we know works. So not following that process, you know, letting imposter syndrome get in the way, you know, inferiority complex, not actually doing the things that we recommend people to do, like inviting people on the podcast or reading the sponsor message or asking for guest recommendations afterwards when people don't do those things, you know, what do you know? It ends up not working as well. So you know that does happen.

It's the nature of any business.

Richard Walker: 06:47

Yeah, man, imposter syndrome is such a thing. I mean, here's how it happened for me. I went on your show. In fact, I asked you if you're looking for people like me, you're like, yeah, I'd love to have you on the show. So that was really awesome.

You didn't pitch me at all. You did nothing to pitch me on your services. I paid attention, though. I saw what was going on. I went to your website.

I'm like, oh, B2B, great way to do marketing. And then I called you and said, hey, this kind of makes sense, but I had that imposter syndrome. I'm like, I never thought of myself in any kind of broadcast method. I didn't I don't like my voice. I didn't like the way I looked on camera, all the things everybody talks about.

And I want to tell you something because I had this breakthrough not long ago. Imposter syndrome is a lack of identity. I didn't have the identity of a podcaster yet. Yeah. So when I went through your process of onboarding and everything, that's when I formed that identity of, I'm going to be a podcaster.

And I committed to that. And so I try to do the best I can possibly do with that. What do you think? If you were to rate kind of like the top thing that slows people down from doing this or wanting to jump on, what do you think it is?

John Corcoran: 07:54

I don't know what number one is. It could be Overthinking it. It could be substituting their judgment and assumptions about what? What would work? What wouldn't work.

You know, be like me going into your business and being like, well, I know how to build forms for an enterprise company. I mean, you've been doing it for a long time. You know this stuff a hundred times. A thousand times better than I do. You know, we've been doing I've been at this.

I started my podcast 15 years ago. Jeremy started his career 17 years ago. We've seen all the good and the bad and the ugly. And so, you know, there are people that kind of assume that they are gonna they're going to reinvent the wheel or they fixate on, oh, I need to have the perfect idea for this podcast when it's really not about that. It's about having really great conversations.

Or they assume that it's going to take extra time, and so they recoil from it or they put it off when the truth is that it. I firmly believe a podcast doesn't take you extra time. It actually saves you a lot of time, you know, because how would I ever get a billionaire or a CEO of a publicly traded company to give me 45 minutes, an hour of their day? I wouldn't they wouldn't do it. But for the fact that I'm recording it for a podcast, so it could take me years to try and connect with someone like that.

But the podcast short-circuits it. You know, it's it's a cheat code. You know, it gets you access to people. So I firmly believe that it actually saves you time. So those are a number of the different ways that people get held back.

Richard Walker: 09:30

Yeah, I honestly thought the hardest job would be finding guests for my show.

John Corcoran: 09:34

A lot of people do. They think that. Yeah.

Richard Walker: 09:36

Yeah. And the first step that you walk us through is the blueprint for the top 100 people you'd want to have on your show. And going through that process made it so easy for me to see, wow, I know more people than I thought. I have more people in my warm opportunity list of people I could call and say, would you be on my show? I mean, I had eight people on my show before I launched.

It was like, wow, this is not that hard. And then I always had this ongoing fear of like, Will I fill all the time slots that I need to fill one week? Will I always have that cadence? And for the last year I've had more. More than I can handle.

It's amazing.

John Corcoran: 10:08

Yeah, yeah. And you start with the people that know, like and trust you. There's plenty of people like that, you know, there's past clients, there's past referral partners. There's your champions. You know, there's people that you know in your industry.

You can start with those. And many most of those people say yes regardless, you know, like you don't need to tell me anything about downloads. I don't care. Like I'll do it because you asked me to because it would be great to have a conversation. And the other thing is that, you know, you and most people starting B2B podcasts have got deep knowledge and expertise, and that's valuable.

You know, there's lots of people that would love to have a conversation with you, maybe pick your brain a little bit or hear a little bit how you think, you know. And that's I discovered that when I was an attorney practicing law 15 years ago, and I started my podcast for my legal practice, and I didn't realize that a lot of times people were curious to ask me a question or they're thinking in their head. They're thinking like, when do I ever get a lawyer who's not billing me in six? You know, a 10th of an hour increments, you know, six minute increments, you know, and they would look for that opportunity to ask me a question about some legal issue, you know, which, of course, which is where I wanted to be with them, you know, because I was a lawyer, right? I was like, wanted to get into that conversation.

So, you know, a lot of times we don't realize that they're that if given the opportunity, people would oftentimes are looking to have a conversation with you. They're interested in hearing what, you know, something from you.

Richard Walker: 11:32

Yeah. For me, one of the best parts of doing a podcast is I get to meet one person, high high-quality person, for an hour every single week, and I don't have to go travel to a conference, and I only go to a few conferences a year anyway. You don't get the highest quality time with those people at the conference, and then you wait 3 or 6 months to see them again. So this is like so high quality.

John Corcoran: 11:51

And, you know, if you do it leading up to a conference, then you can see this group of people that you have a stronger relationship with. This just happened to me. I went to the EO Global Leadership Conference in Hawaii, and I saw a bunch of people that I interviewed over the last previous years, and they were excited to see me and came up and, you know, we had a nice conversation, you know, and, you know, I've even done like, small group dinners around certain conferences where I invite a bunch of people that I had at, you know, that I had, you know, interviewed over the years to come, come together or even like, actually the keynote speaker, one of the keynote speakers was a Guy Kawasaki who I'd had on my podcast. I actually talked to him about starting a podcast, like, I don't know, five years ago, way before he started a podcast, he was writing ebooks about Google+. At the time, I was like, you need to start a podcast, man.

And then he was on stage giving this keynote talking about the why he felt that. Right. You know, doing a podcast was the new writing a book, you know, and that everyone should start a podcast. So it was really cool to see that, you know, like someone come, come complete, full circle.

Richard Walker: 13:02

Yeah. No. That's amazing. So you started this. Did you have a mentor?

Did you have somebody guide you and give you help?

John Corcoran: 13:09

I didn't. In the podcast world. But I had years earlier in a different context. Maybe this is maybe 18 years ago. I was kind of doing some freelance writing, and I had this woman contact me who was didn't like writing.

She I forget what her business was, but she had this business and she had this basically business development process where she would call people up and do an interview with them over the phone and record it, and then turned it into an article that she would then publish. And I realized that it wasn't really about the article, which she was outsourcing to me to write. It was about the relationship with the person and using that process to create some content. And that was a real insight for me. It was like, oh, wow, this is really cool what she's doing here.

You know, it's kind of a win-win all around, but she's really just using it to build a relationship with that person. And I just observed it when I was a writer, freelance writer, writing up, turning it into an article. What? What? And then I started to do that, and I started doing that for writing.

So I wrote for Forbes and Entrepreneur and Inc. and Business Insider and all these different places. But what I found was that those, you know, publications would open doors, but I wasn't able to build as many relationships. So like when I wrote for Forbes, I maybe did 8 to 10 articles a year because it was really time-intensive, laborious. A lot of work went into putting those articles together. And then when I stopped doing that and I shifted to just doing the podcast, it's still open doors, but I was able to build many more relationships in the same amount of time.

So I probably put the same amount of time in, but I would have 45, 50 or so conversations for the podcast and then delegate all the work to turn it into a podcast episode, but still billed as build way more relationships. So it was kind of like a series of insights. And then Jeremy really helped me because I was almost I was on the verge of giving up my podcast after five years. I've been doing for five years. He and I started a different business together, and we were working on doing this business, and I'd publish zero episodes, one calendar year, and at the end of that calendar year, he'd published 100 episodes.

And I was like, what are you doing? Right? That I'm not doing right. And he's a real systems guy. So he looked at my systems.

He was like, this is all the things you're doing wrong. You need to stop doing this, stop doing this, stop doing this, stop doing this. Like, doesn't matter. And it was really like, you know, I had these assumptions at the time about like, oh, I need to do this or I need to do that or whatever. And it was like, you don't need to do that.

It was overcomplicating the process. And once I stripped that out and just focused on maximizing relationships, I went from publishing zero episodes to the next year, publishing 52 one per week, and it was probably took me less time and was far more valuable for my business. So he really guided me in that and like showed me how to do it in a lot more effective way. And then that we turned it around and people started asking us how we could do it for them. And a business was born.

Richard Walker: 16:03

Man. You know what's ironic about what you just said? I asked you, what are the top reasons people don't choose to start a podcast? You did not say because they're afraid of doing the work. In fact, they want to do the work.

Yeah. You wanted to do the work. You thought you had to do the work. And many of the people I talked to are like, yeah, I want to do a podcast. They're like, I'm looking at this platform and this technology and this service because I'm going to build all these things.

I'm going to do all the editing. Hey, I was guilty of it. I was editing all the YouTube videos at the beginning.

John Corcoran: 16:28

Yeah.

Richard Walker: 16:29

And that's not the problem. The problem is we have to get out of our own way. We have to delegate. We have to trust others to do the service. So I want to shift gears a little bit here.

You run a service, you have a team of people. You have customer success and customer service and customer journey. What are some of the biggest challenges that you and your team face of providing great service to your customers?

John Corcoran: 16:49

Well, definitely. Early on it was me getting out of the way and thinking that I needed to be the one to have that interaction with the customers. Classic mistake, right? I mean, you hear this a million times. You hear that all the time where people think that they need to be the one.

And it wasn't until I eventually realized that our team could actually do it better and quicker than I could, that I was okay with it. I mean, we even, like years ago, shifted from using individual email addresses to creating one VIP client email address that was checked by multiple team members throughout the day. And I thought that I was like, how? How can we do that? But I realized that that was really critical because it allowed our team to really respond much quicker.

You know, and I'm busy during the day. I'm literally from call to call to call to call. And then at the end of the day, I take a look and I look on slack, and I look in email, and I see that there was an issue that came up with the client at 830 in the morning when I'm dropping off my kid at school. Someone responded within 15 minutes, The team in slack was discussing how to diagnose the issue and how to deal with it. They came up with a solution.

They responded to the client, and there's a thread of responses back to the client, and it's resolved by the time I'm even able to read the first message. And I realized that is such a better experience for the client. They don't care that it wasn't me that was involved in that discussion at all. I was copied on the emails and I read them. But hours later, what they care about is that their problem was solved.

And so that is really cool. And so I initially I was the problem was that I didn't realize that that could be a better way. And Jeremy really did. And now it's that which works much better. So the challenge now is like coaching the team on how to handle individual client personalities.

Because everyone's different, right? Like some clients like just the facts. Others are like more emotional. Some people, you know you know, want to get a response immediately. Others are like, don't give me any information until you get me.

Give me all the information. And so I think what as you as we get into a discussion around AI, I think what's fascinating is, is, is understanding the clients better and their personality and how they want to be communicated with. And I think we could do a vastly better job of that, because right now we most businesses communicate with all of their clients in the same way. They don't communicate in the way that is best for that person. And we all like to be communicated with differently.

And so I think that AI will enable us to communicate with each client in the way that the client likes to be communicated with.

Richard Walker: 19:36

Nice. Okay. So let's summarize back what a few things you said. So number one, the customer doesn't care that John didn't solve the problem. They care that the problem was solved.

Oh my gosh, that is so important. That is so important because that is such truth, right? Nobody actually cares who solved the problem as long as it gets solved. And two, You're saying that customers have their styles. They have their preferences.

They have their ways of communicating that you're trying to morph and work with. And so you're now using AI to help with that.

John Corcoran: 20:05

I'm understanding it on the on the tip on the tip of it. Like we're I wouldn't say that we've baked it into a process yet. I think this will evolve. We're experimenting with different methods of doing that.

Richard Walker: 20:18

Because I also experienced the same. We have customers that I think of are high maintenance. They call about everything. They think it's our fault all the time. No matter what system actually went down, there's another party.

Doesn't matter. Right? Right. And they love to escalate and escalate and escalate, especially to me. Oh I got Rich involved.

He's going to solve it now. And to me.

John Corcoran: 20:38

When the truth is a lot of times there's someone better on your team who can do a much better job. Right.

Richard Walker: 20:42

Well, and I look, I love it. I love that they have such faith and trust in us that they feel they can escalate to me. I don't mind that they escalate to me, but the truth is, 99% of the time my team has the answer, I don't. I still have to go back to my team and say, What is the answer to this? And so at most, what I'm doing is making sure my team knows this is super important to the customer.

But again, 99 out of 100 times, my team is already on it. Yeah. And so this actually comes to something that we try to address, which is if the customer is escalating to me, they don't they're not getting enough feedback. How do we give them more feedback. Right.

And like response times our average response time is something like 24 minutes for an email. Our goal is 60 minutes. And it doesn't always happen. Sometimes it takes hours to get back. So what's the customer thinking if you're not getting back to them?

John Corcoran: 21:29

Right.

Richard Walker: 21:30

How are you addressing that? What's your kind of response time and challenge?

John Corcoran: 21:33

Well, our direction to our team is to respond immediately no matter what. Interestingly, we this is an interesting change we made recently. We used to have all the different people sign their name down at the bottom. So it's all going to the same email inbox. And we used to have it different people would sign their name.

We recently shifted it to one person's name. Even if I know the breaking news here. The reason we did that was because we found some clients were getting frustrated, feeling that there were there were like too many people involved.

Richard Walker: 22:09

No continuity. Right?

John Corcoran: 22:10

No continuity. Like, oh, I'm telling this person that. And then the truth was, is that they all knew it all, like it was all being communicated and tracked and stuff like that. So we realized that the email support@rise25.com is our comm is our email address. That's we call it our VIP client inbox.

That was universal. But then we put these different names at the bottom, and it was kind of confusing. So instead we changed it. And we have one person's name on there. The truth is there's a team of about ten people that are drafting responses, and a lot of the clients probably don't know that.

They just think that it's the same person always responding.

Richard Walker: 22:47

Okay, but here's the.

Real question is, is that same person responding that that single name, is that a real person?

John Corcoran: 22:52

Now it's a real person. Yeah. Yeah, but what if they quit?

Richard Walker: 22:56

There's all your continuity leaves.

John Corcoran: 22:58

They're superhuman. They're responding to, you know, dozens and dozens of emails a day. Right? You know, the another piece that's involved here is elevating your team and communicating to the client and letting them know that our team does a better job than me. They are on top of it.

They are responding 24 hours a day that, you know, I'm a busy person. I've got lots of different things. I eat our own dog food, meaning I do podcast interviews. Also. You don't want to wait for a response from me.

You know, it's really training the client. You know, Jeremy talks about this all the time. It's really training the client, training the customer, you know, the way that they should behave. So a lot of times it's me holding back from responding to a thread, because if I do then they oh like, oh John's paying attention to this. I'm just going to go directly to John and try and get a response from him, you know.

So I try and hold back. We try and coach the team and let them kind of take the lead, and it also lets them take ownership over it too. You know, we don't want them to think, oh, John will handle this. Jeremy will handle this, you know, because then it allows them to kind of take their foot off the gas.

Richard Walker: 24:02

You know, this same thing happens not just to you as a leader, but other people on your team if they're responding from their personal email and managing a relationship. So our team has this problem. I'm going to tell you my favorite way to communicate to a customer how to change this. And I I started doing this, gosh, 22 years ago. I think I will say to a customer via email, please don't allow me to be the bottleneck in getting your answer.

John Corcoran: 24:25

Oh, I love that. That's great.

Richard Walker: 24:27

I have a whole team ready to support you. All you have to do is send it to support. So many people think that if I send it to a generic inbox, nobody's going to read it. It's a black hole. It's the opposite.

Everybody reads it. It's tracked in a system where we have metrics on it. We're managing time, we're managing. How can we do a one-touch close on on this email or not? So that's something like 80% of our emails are closed with the first response.

And that's a huge goal of ours.

John Corcoran: 24:53

Oh.

Richard Walker: 24:54

Yeah. So I find it fascinating that you have these challenges. Yeah. So I want to go back to the concept of, I hear, do you have a favorite AI tool that you guys have used?

John Corcoran: 25:04

Oh, geez. You know, I go I bounce between different ones. So I use ChatGPT and perplexity the most. Lately I've gotten into testing out vibe coding. So, you know, there's replit and there's lovable or two of the ones that I've been playing around with.

I'm always reading about different tools. I recently created a presentation like a slide deck presentation using gamma. So I'm trying, you know, different ones. And then, you know, a lot of the existing tools are adding AI in, you know, just making it directly into their product. So that's interesting as well.

I got my 11-year-old had a big school project that he was working on, and so I was using it with him. I was trying to show him the responsible way to use it, you know, not an irresponsible way. So he's not like, really like he's using it to kind of accelerate what he's creating rather than, you know, do the work for him. I think that's really important. I think we're really in a real gray area right now.

We don't understand how to teach kids about AI and how our educational system will evolve. I've read a bunch of articles, listened to a bunch of podcasts about that, and there's just real confusion, I think, in all levels of academia about how we are going to teach kids in the age of AI. So yeah, those are some of the ones that I'm using.

Richard Walker: 26:28

Yeah, man, the education that's a hard topic. We're thinking about sending our kids to a, a, a school, a public school that has no technology, no screens. Yeah. And I really think that's going to be a good direction for us to go in. But that aside, that aside, okay, I know you have been very generous with giving people advice, guidance, feedback because we're part of the EO network and I see you commenting on things you're never, ever, ever selling yourself.

I know that about you, Jon Jeremy as well. So I'm kind of curious. There's so much debate with people about podcasting. Do you can we have a debate on zoom versus Riverside versus any other platform for why you use what to record? I use zoom and I love it.

I have no issues with it. But do you have a perspective?

John Corcoran: 27:17

Oh man, I'm going to disappoint you, Rich. We're kind of agnostic when it comes to that stuff. There are certain people that insist on using certain tools. I will say this zoom had hundreds of millions of dollars of investment capital that was thrown at it and a global pandemic, and just about everyone used zoom. And so it is incredibly stable and consistent and everyone knows how to use it.

And those are great advantages. Is it the most flawless one out there that's going to get you the 99.9% 9% perfect audio and video. Maybe not, but why are we optimizing for that anyways? I think that it's good enough. It does a great job.

You know, I've seen many people that have used other startup tools out there that are designed for podcasting at some startup that got, you know, $1 million in VC funding, and then they're open for business, you know, three months later, and then people use it with their biggest client, and then the file is lost or corrupt or damaged or something like that, and it damages the relationship with the person. And that's a shame, you know, that that happens. So I wouldn't want to risk it. So there are lots of tools out there. There are more coming out.

Some of them have gotten multiple rounds of funding, are getting more stable, and I'm hearing better things about it. I haven't found like the perfect solution yet. And even if it is great audio again, it boils down to most of the clients we're working with are a B2B business. They're using it to build relationships. You don't need to optimize for like audio that would, you know, be used in a, you know, major cinematic movie.

You know, you don't need you don't need that level.

Richard Walker: 29:02

Yeah. And in fact, I was probably typical of your first customer. Which microphone do I need? It was like the first question that everybody wants to ask.

John Corcoran: 29:10

And everyone wants to talk about that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Richard Walker: 29:13

And you're like a microphone. That's it. You need a microphone? Yeah.

John Corcoran: 29:17

Well, the funny thing about the microphone, too, is that you've got it in front of your face, but people will buy a $300 microphone and then they'll be like.

Richard Walker: 29:24

I don't understand why the audio quality is not very good.

John Corcoran: 29:27

You know, it's like the microphone is not in front of your mouth. If you look at, you know, you know, like a Howard Stern, like major broadcasters, major long time, you know, even Joe Rogan, now they have the microphone right in front of their mouth. And that's what gives you really good quality.

Richard Walker: 29:42

Yeah, yeah. I was on somebody else's podcast and she the woman who was choreographing it for us and testing everything. She's like, can you move your microphone up? I'm like, wow, I didn't realize it wasn't close enough to me. I learned from that.

Yeah. Oh, man. I could keep going and asking you questions about this because I love my podcast, and I tell people two things about it. This is the best marketing tool I've ever had. And two, please don't take it away from me.

I just enjoy it so much.

John Corcoran: 30:07

That's great. I love to hear that. That really makes my day.

Richard Walker: 30:11

So before we wrap this up and I get to my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

John Corcoran: 30:17

I'm on LinkedIn, John Corcoran on LinkedIn. You can email us or our team support@rise25.com or John@rise25.com or go to our website. Rise25. Yeah, I'd love to connect with people. I'd love to talk about this stuff.

Richard Walker: 30:33

Yeah. Awesome. You are. You are who you say you are. All right, here comes one of my favorite questions for my podcast.

Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

John Corcoran: 30:46

Okay. All right. I'm going to mention I was thinking of two earlier. I mentioned three. So.

Two from the past and one from today. So the two from the past are Charles McGlashan and Walter Capps. And Walter Capps was a professor who was elected to Congress from my university. And I got to know him a little bit before he sadly died quite suddenly ten months into his term in office. His first term in Congress, in Congress.

And it was just amazing, down-to-earth, individual, charismatic, who also created a groundbreaking course, actually, about the Vietnam War that helped many Vietnam veterans to deal with the trauma of their past, of having gone through the Vietnam War. So just a wonderful human being. And then the other one was Charles McGlashan, who was a friend of mine who was also an elected official. I worked in government early in my career, so hence the impact there. He was a locally elected official and just had an outsized impact.

He created, you know, this energy agency that exists to this day and has saved tons of, of greenhouse gases and, and just had a real amazing vision that really rallied a lot of people behind him, just really motivated a lot of people. Very charismatic individual. Also died tragically. Actually, at my age right now. He died at 49.

I'm 49 now. So I miss him a lot. But the one from today is Jason Swenk. He has an agency owners community and was a classic case of being interviewed him for a podcast. Afterwards, we realized wow, there's a lot of synergies between our businesses.

Maybe we could collaborate in different ways. That led to a ton of different collaborations where we've been a paying member of his community or we've done trainings for him. You know, he's been on our podcast, we've been on his podcast. We've even actually do podcast episodes for him as a guest host. Jeremy is a mentor in another one of his communities.

So I love that kind of thing where you have a podcast interview with someone and then you realize, oh my gosh, we have a lot in common. There's a lot of ways we can collaborate. And then that just leads to a bunch of other opportunities from there. And so that's been a really nice one.

Richard Walker: 32:59

Oh that's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. All right, I hate to wrap this up, but I want to give a big thank you to John Corcoran, co-founder of Rise25, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out John and Jeremy's website at Rise25.com.

And don't forget to check out quick at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Thank you so much for joining me today, John.

John Corcoran: 33:30

Thank you, Rich.

Outro: 33:32

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