My guest for this episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Ravi Sharma, is currently based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, but this time last year, that wasn’t the plan. His digital agency, Webomaze , which does marketing, SEO, web design, and mobile apps, just to name a few things, was solely based in India at the time. He and some of his team had come to Australia to see what the market was like to consider doing some business there. But then, as you know, something happened in Marc...
Apr 28, 2021•27 min
My guest for this episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast is Alain Hunkins who has trained individuals and teams in 2000+ businesses in over 25 countries over the last two decades. He is originally from NYC but currently lives in the Netherlands. Fascinatingly, Alain’s curiosity about how people interact with each other is informed by an undergraduate degree in Literature with a minor in psychology and a graduate degree in...theater! That fact kicked off our conversation, as Alain pointed...
Apr 21, 2021•42 min
LinkedIn continues to be an even more relevant part of networking and sales and it’s not often that you can speak with someone who’s been on the inside of that company, helping businesses use the platform to get outstanding results in recruiting and sales. My guest for this episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Jonathan Baldock, is one of those insiders. Based in Toronto, Jonathan spent a decade helping LI’s largest global customers with their recruitment goals as well as advising on ...
Apr 14, 2021•33 min
I recently had a chance to appear on the Next Level Ecommerce podcast and had such a great conversation with the host, Isaac Smith, that I invited him to come and share some of his wisdom on my very own Mads Singers Management Podcast . Isaac has been in E-commerce since 2014 and worked through a number of different businesses and projects before finding success with one in particular that he sold last year. I was keen to hear his stories and lessons about how to build a successful team that can...
Apr 07, 2021•56 min
While many people struggled to survive when the Covid-19 pandemic began (and continued), Lindsay Tjepkema and her team at Casted have had a very different problem: managing growth. The company is only two years old and half of that has been in the middle of a series of lockdowns and restrictions that no one ever planned for. But while Casted entered the pandemic in March 2020 with 10 team members, they now have 20. Casted is an amplified marketing platform that helps enterprise B2B marketing tea...
Mar 31, 2021•34 min
Yellow Pages was a dominant advertising paradigm for many small businesses for so many years and it worked well for many of them. Put up an ad and the sales would roll in. Today’s guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast , John Vuong, lived in that universe for ten years before transitioning to the digital advertising world. John really enjoyed working with small business owners and watching their journeys to build successful businesses . He had a passion for helping them on that journey an...
Mar 24, 2021•34 min
It’s always nice when our guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast is familiar with hosting a podcast. In this episode, I’m chatting with Jesse Jackson (no, not that Jesse Jackson) about best practices when it comes to managing and communicating with teams . Jesse has spent most of his career in the call-center business, working in various divisions, be it sales, customer service, and tech support. He has managed teams from 25-50 people. When he’s not with his family he’s recording podcasts...
Mar 17, 2021•37 min
Today’s guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Timothy Colson, has spent many years in leadership, first in a big box retailer for almost a decade, then for a nationwide insurance company. Today he runs his own insurance and financial services firm in New York, about an hour outside Manhattan. Part of why Timothy runs his own firm today is his love of culture and the way that it can shape a team. “ We sell commodities. There’s no need to take that so very seriously. I want a team that v...
Mar 10, 2021•40 min
Believe it or not, there was a time when there was nothing like Google Ads on the Internet. All you could find were documents and PDFs floating around explaining how to “improve traffic” to your website, but there was nothing like the SEO industry that exists today. One of those early pioneers (with one of those PDFs in hand) was Phil Drinkwater. He originally trained as a programmer and helped to design video games. He moved into project management and picked up SEO and UX/UI along the way. He’...
Mar 03, 2021•40 min
We often complain about the fact that there’s so much that “they” don’t teach us in school that we need not just for our careers, but for life. Turns out that instead of just adding one more voice to that chorus, someone decided to address those challenges by writing a book. Today’s guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Mark Herschberg, is the author of the new book The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success that No One Taught You . Mark has managed to pull off a rare trick: 20 y...
Feb 24, 2021•51 min
We hear a lot in the news these days about “diversity” and “inclusion” and it’s often best to speak to someone who is working on these issues each day to get a sense of the state of affairs. Today I welcome one of those people, Genesis Amaris Kemp, to the Mads Singers Management Podcast . Genesis is a self-proclaimed “enthusiast” for inclusivity and diversity and has a book that outlines her thoughts on the subject: Chocolate Drop in Corporate America . Genesis and I started the episode talking ...
Feb 17, 2021•39 min
Hiring is one of my favorite topics to discuss, and my guest for today’s episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Mark Webster, had so much good information to share about that topic. Mark is Scottish but has spent enough time in the US that his accent is somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. He currently runs Authority Hacker , which he co-founded in 2014. Authority Hacker educates website owners about the ins and outs of SEO. In a previous life, he ran a digital marketing agency with 30 team ...
Feb 10, 2021•50 min
It’s often said that a business is a way for the founders and employees to bring their theories to life. Sometimes those founders have enough energy and vision to drive multiple businesses. Today’s guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast is Matt Diggity and he is very much one of those types of founders. His businesses include (drum roll): Diggity Marketing (a blog about digital marketing), Leadspring (a firm that builds authority, monetizes, and eventually sells affiliate websites), Autho...
Feb 03, 2021•41 min
Seven years ago Martin Ebongue was living in France, working at a job that he enjoyed. But he wanted more freedom, and since he had already built some online businesses with good revenue streams, he was able to quit that job and go on a world tour for 18 months. He ended up settling down in Bali, which is where he was when he joined me as a guest for an episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast . One of the big themes of discussion for us on this episode was delegation . Martin stressed the...
Jan 27, 2021•34 min
SaaS is such a key part of the business world in general so it’s always great to go behind the scenes with someone who is actually in the trenches, building and managing a SaaS. Jeroen Corthout, our guest for today’s episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , is building Salesflare, a B2B CRM servicing a few thousand companies. While you might think of a SaaS as the company that would be most likely to be built by a distributed remote team , prior to March 2020 Salesflare was 100% in-perso...
Jan 20, 2021•31 min
Sometimes entrepreneurs can be so focused on working for themselves that it’s considered shameful to ever go and work for someone else. But when you have such a limiting belief, you miss out on the opportunity to learn. Our guest for today’s episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Effie Parnell-Hopkinson, is someone who didn’t limit herself and came away from a job experience with some lessons that helped her level up. Effie has spent some of her careers as a bodybuilder and while study...
Jan 13, 2021•30 min
It’s not often that we’re able to speak to someone who has managed in three different cultures, and that’s why I was so excited to welcome Alex Zuev of Ardor SEO onto the Mads Singers Management Podcast . Alex is a self-proclaimed IT geek and started his career developing payment systems in Russia similar to Paypal. After success in that field, he started his own business and as part of the bootstrapping process learned how to do his own SEO. Soon enough he was helping others with that, too. He ...
Jan 06, 2021•34 min
It’s not often that you’ll hear a guitar strumming in the background of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , but that’s precisely what my guest Chris Wilson was doing at one point when we discussed the changing ways his team gave music lessons post-Covid. Chris graduated from the Berklee College of Music in the 1990s as a guitarist and started teaching in his apartment. Before long his practice grew and pre-Covid he and his team of 25 were servicing 650 clients at the Academy of Music and Art j...
Dec 30, 2020•39 min
Employee engagement is a secret weapon of fast-growing businesses, and today’s guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Tonya Sowles, is someone deeply passionate about making sure team members are engaged, not just counting hours until they clock out. She’s a general business consultant specializing in HR. While she is a Senior Certified Professional for the Society of Human Resource Management, she’s also got an MBA and over 20 years of business experience. She loves helping owners maxi...
Dec 23, 2020•44 min
While we frequently talk to entrepreneurs on the Mads Singers Management Podcast , we also enjoy speaking with top leaders at companies. Today’s guest, Esbe Van Heerden of OnFolio , is one of those leaders. She’s spent five years building and running online businesses, with a heavy focus on operations. Esbe started our discussion by explaining the challenges of rapid growth . In her case they went from five team members to 25, and from 25 assets under management to 52. That meant that as systems...
Dec 16, 2020•41 min
A common theme discussed on the Mads Singers Management Podcast is the question of hiring. Who to hire, when to hire them, and perhaps most importantly, where to find them. Our guest for today’s episode of the pod, Tim Brown, has had plenty of time to think about these questions in recent years as he’s grown his business, Hook Agency . One of the first things I talked about with Tim was how challenging it can be to grow a business financially. As you go from 10+ employees up to 50 , you’re not g...
Dec 09, 2020•44 min
While technology is an important part of scaling any business, without the right people, that scaling will never be successful. This is a deeply held belief of my guest for today’s episode of the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Ryan Stewart. Ryan, like many entrepreneurs I know (myself included), doesn’t limit himself to one business. But he has smartly ensured that all three play in the same space: Webris , a digital marketing agency focused on SEO for B2B SaaS, The Blueprint Training , to tr...
Dec 02, 2020•36 min
When COVID-19 made remote work more mentally possible for many businesses, the tools necessary to maintain and sustain that remote work, like Zoom, thrived. Today’s guest for the Mads Singers Management Podcast , Liam Martin, co-founded Time Doctor , a SaaS that has also continued to do well during this strange global period. If running Time Doctor wasn’t enough, Liam also runs a conference called Running Remote , a business he started in part just to find out the answers he needed as he continu...
Nov 25, 2020•42 min
Sometimes the side project you are working on ends up dwarfing your day job and becomes the path you never expected. That’s what happened to my guest for this episode of Mads Singers Management Podcast , Slawek Czajkowski. In 2008 he was building a company out of a small village in Poland when his side project, Surfer SEO , offered such possibilities for scale and growth that he knew he had to give it his full attention. So he did. Right away Slawek realized that he and his fellow managers had t...
Nov 18, 2020•33 min
One of the biggest mistakes people make when scaling their business beyond their first ten employees or beyond their first million in annual revenue is thinking that what got them here will get them to the next level. My guest for this episode of Mads Singers Management Podcast , Jan Cavelle, knows better. She’s experienced all levels of business and has learned many hard lessons about scaling, all of which will be going into her forthcoming book from Bloomsbury: Scale for Success . One of the k...
Nov 11, 2020•38 min
My guest for this episode of Mads Singers Management Podcast is Greg Gibas who, like me, also owns an outsourcing company based in the Philippines. Even though Greg was born in Poland, his family moved to the United States when he was young. He ended up doing a Masters in Marketing in Australia and built a business in the Philippines. He’s been living the digital nomad life long before it was cool. One of the first things we talked about was how Covid may end up being the moment when remote work...
Nov 04, 2020•39 min
I live in the SEO world and so it’s always a pleasure to chat with someone about SEO, but even better when I can combine that discussion with another topic close to my heart: building and scaling companies. That’s why my guest for this episode of Mads Singers Management Podcast , Nick Jordan, had so many interesting things to share about his journey. Originally a sales and product guy at early-stage startups he wanted to make a move into marketing instead. After a stint as a freelancer he saw so...
Oct 28, 2020•57 min
One of the ironies of discussing company culture is the fact that so often some of my coaching clients who are trying to grow as entrepreneurs describe their company’s culture as what they would like it to be, not as it actually is at the moment. Culture is the beating heart of any organization and when that’s muddled or off-track, everything suffers. My guest for this episode Mads Singers Management Podcast is someone who knows that in her core. Jocelyn Kopac, like me, started her first busines...
Oct 21, 2020•54 min
Sometimes what sets us on a particular journey in life is not a particular aptitude or knowledge of a subject, but a traumatic failure. When you hit rock bottom you get a certain clarity of thought that can help you not only to avoid such mistakes in the future, but to share those lessons with others. Zachary Pritchard, today’s guest for Mads Singers Management Podcast , is someone who dealt with two such failures and has made them strengths: communication and finance. While his undergraduate de...
Oct 14, 2020•40 min
Reading The Four Hour Work Week is easy. Implementing the lifestyle it puts forth requires effort, discipline, and often a bit of help from others. Zsofia Banyai happens to be one of those others. She helps busy entrepreneurs automate and systematize their lives and is today’s guest for Mads Singers Management Podcast. Zsofia didn’t initially opt for the 4HWW life herself. Her undergraduate studies started in history but her practical side kicked in and pushed her towards finance, where she spen...
Oct 08, 2020•52 min
