Behind the Scenes with a Top Rated Podcast Host & Speaker Featuring Justin Schenck

He's an entrepreneur , he's a speaker , he's the host of the top rated podcast called the Growth Now Movement , and he's been named a top eight podcaster to follow by Inc Magazine . He's been featured in Thrive Global and chosen as the icon of influence in the new media space .

I'm going to pause right now just to say that we've actually been chatting for the past 20 minutes .

He has a super successful podcast and he's going to speak at PodFest , which , by the time you are listening to this episode , is back in the past , but I know a couple of people who are going to that event , and so to have a PodFest speaker on , wow cool , all right .

The rest of his bio , his podcast has grown to become a podcast that's currently getting played in over a hundred countries every single week , and that's currently getting played in over 100 countries every single week , and he's gone on to help countless people grow their brands and business with his company podbrandio .

He's also the host and creator of one of the go-to events for entrepreneurs and forward thinkers and that is called the Grow Now Summit Live , and you'll get more info about that if you would like to attend later on in this episode . I will say welcome , justin Shane .

Podcasting used to be the topic that I really dove into , so this is going to be a ton of fun being able to share how much podcasting has changed and how people can utilize it to grow their business and their reach .

I know , like our listeners get a lot of value from hearing successful entrepreneurs online entrepreneurs and seeing how they grew their business . And , of course , in the next episode , you're listening right now and you're like okay , where are we going to get to how to grow the podcast ? Here's something that caught me off guard .

Justin was talking to us and saying what did he say ? Jamie , 80% of podcast posts get less than 100 downloads per episode . And then he was like growing a podcast isn't about directly marketing it , but building a solid brand . And well , justin , you've done that . So that's the next episode Right now .

Can you give us a snapshot of your business as it stands January 2025 ?

So , obviously , the podcast , first and foremost , is the thing that I built first and have been able to create some brand deals and get some sponsorship dollars that way , which has been really , really great . I also run a mastermind called the Skeleton Key Mastermind for six and seven figure earners . I host my own live event .

I get paid to speak all over the country , and so , yeah , it's really that multiple streams of income .

And then , of course , podbrand , where we help podcasters create social media content from their videos that they record from their podcast , which that in itself is a change in the podcast space , but absolutely feel blessed to be able to do what I do and it's it's a real honor to be able to , you know , have these conversations that I get to have and yeah , man

, it's been a wild ride to get to this point . I'm sure we'll get into all the failures and the mistakes I made to get here .

No , you know , just like anybody else , right Like in 2020 , I lost 80% of my income when COVID hit because most of my focus was on speaking and my live event every single year , and so , obviously , when the world shut down , I really had to reevaluate how my business was structured and how it looked , and ended up hiring a coach and completely shifting a ton

of stuff online . I launched my first course , which did really well , and then I then I shut it down but that's a whole nother conversation but really had to shift my business from that standpoint of like , okay , well , this I didn't realize speaking could get taken away from me , but it did .

I didn't realize my live event could get taken away from me , but it did , and I really had to shift . And that was probably the first huge fall on my face . Have to figure this out real quick so I can afford my bills , right , right . So how did you get started in the online space ? What were you doing before ? How did you pivot to this ?

Like the delusion that I had going into all of this and I ended up buying like a $70 course online of how to like , record and upload and all these things , right . And so this was nine years ago .

The original idea behind the podcast was I was going to sit down and interview entrepreneurs and pick their brain and figure out how I could build a business , because at that point I had three failed businesses that I tried to churn up . You know , the years prior to launching the show , and what ended up happening was my mom .

My mom had battled opioids for 20 years of her life and she ended up ultimately losing that battle six months before I launched the show .

And because , because I was going through all that , that turmoil and being upset about all that stuff and losing my favorite person in the world because she was a phenomenal mom even though she had her own demons I organically started having conversations with my guests about rock bottom moments and how to overcome , and I think the authenticity in the conversations that

I had back then , when there were a lot less podcasts , really started to gain traction and people started to pay attention and , you know it really allowed me to have deep connection with my guests . And then , therefore , you know my audience .

And then I realized from that standpoint , I was like , oh , hold on , I'm building a brand here , people are recognizing me as a really good interviewer , they're asking me to speak at their events and completely shifted what I thought was going to be my business . And so that's how I started to get into speaking .

And then , obviously , the next iteration of like I get this honor to sit down and interview some of the smartest people in the world , people who have done it , people who make billions of dollars and they're celebrities and whatever .

How do I take that and bring that to other people who don't have the ability to have a podcast or don't have the reach of my podcast , et cetera ? And that's why I launched Growth Now Summit Live back in 2019 . And I was like , oh wait , I can actually make money doing this . There was never a thought of like , oh , I could do this full time , right ?

And then that's really what set me forward and again , I didn't know what I was doing . To be honest with you , I probably still don't know what I'm doing , but the thing is , I consistently show up every single day and I say I , you know , I've been fortunate enough to say yes to the right opportunities and no to the wrong ones .

And now I found myself here with , obviously you know , the multiple , multiple businesses and so on and so forth . But again it was , it was accidental for sure , like I had no idea that this was going to happen .

would . The initial idea was to interview entrepreneurs so I could figure out what I did wrong , trying to be an entrepreneur prior to other businesses .

So it started as , like this side thing of like okay , I know I want to escape this corporate world of nine to five or eight to five or whatever , where I felt like I was a prisoner , but clearly I'm not doing it right .

So let me interview these entrepreneurs and figure out how they did it , so I can , so I can learn from them , almost kind of creating my own , you know , getting these people as teachers and bringing them in . And so , yeah , so I was .

I was burning the candle at both ends for the first year of the podcast , and then the company that I work for decided that it was time for me to leave , and so I was like all right , you know , we're either going to sink or swim here , and so the first thing that I started to do , like most people in the podcast space , I did start a podcast production

company that I had run for a couple of years until I just didn't want to do it anymore and I was able to create other streams of income where I could shut it down , and I remember you know this is actually kind of crazy .

So I got fired from my job and I was making good money , but I was also spending good money because I was a 30 year old bachelor , like getting to live the life that I want to live , and so I was supposed to go down to Florida and speak at an event and I had two choices , like I could either pay my rent or go down to Florida and speak at this event

. This is before I got paid to speak and I had to pay my own way and all the fun things in between , and so I decided the smart thing to do was go down to the event and not worry about rent .

And they came back to me and I was at a place where I felt like I had to fit in and I was like I'll have the same thing . I didn't know if my credit card was going to go through . I was like this is terrifying . The waitress comes back and says can I get you guys anything else ?

And they went around the table and everybody said I'll have the same , I'll have another one . And so the point of this is Mike Kim ended up paying for everybody's drinks , so I didn't have to get a declined credit card in front of all these .

But he had said something to me that completely changed my mind about how I was approaching entrepreneurship . So he goes first of all , in podcast production you're literally racing to go broke because everybody's undercutting everybody's prices . You'll have to have too many clients that you can't handle for the small amount of money that you're charging .

You'll have to have too many clients that you can't handle for the small amount of money that you're charging . He goes . But you're the only person in this business who was chosen by Inc magazine as a top eight podcast . Every entrepreneur should follow . You should get paid for your the information in your brain .

So I was like , okay , like people will pay me for that and he's like they'll pay you a lot of money for that . So I went home , made $22,000 in the next three weeks and never look back . So , yeah , great question . I decided . I decided again , ignorance is bliss .

I got on a call with people that I thought should do podcasts and I said , for $5,000 , I'll teach you how to do this podcast . And they said , okay , and so I started to teach people how to do podcasting right . So essentially what I ended up paying for $70 for two years prior . I was now teaching for $5,000 , or roughly right . So give or or take .

And so I had enough people say yes and I was like , okay , this is , we'll run with this , and so that that afforded me a great lifestyle for a long time but then you were able to pay your rent yeah , I , I was able to pay my rent , which was good . I think I was three days late by time , you know .

All the money came in , I was able to do whatever , but it you know , I just never looked back and and there's been an evolution since . I still do some consulting , but it's more about people building their brands and stuff like that . It's not because look , here's the thing , right , if you want to start a podcast , just Google what microphone should I buy ?

How do I record it ? It's so much easier now than it was nine years ago , right , to kind of put that in perspective , like the course that I bought told me to upload my show to SoundCloud , so show to SoundCloud . So I was hosting through SoundCloud for the first probably year .

I would literally record on Skype with Ecamm recorders , like it's such a different world now and it's just so much easier , which is why so many people have podcasts now .

And a number of people have reached out to me and you know , I remember early on , when nobody was listening to the show maybe 40 downloads an episode I was thinking to myself , like what am I doing ? Like this is a ton of work . I'm literally . This is when I still had a job and I was doing the podcast and I was thinking about shutting it down .

Now I did commit when I first started that I was going to do a year . 52 episodes was my original commitment . I'm now at 550 as of tomorrow . Yeah , it's , which is wild . But I remember I was in the forties and I was like I'll just hit the year mark and I'll shut it down .

And somebody from Japan reached out to me on Facebook and said because of your show , I decided not to take my life . And I realized in that moment that I was going to show up no matter what , even if one person was listening .

And then the consistency over time I was able to grow the audience and really make an impact worldwide , which is just really humbling to me .

Let's not don't take me up on the segue , all right , but I remember when I was teaching Chinese to expats non-Chinese folks who lived in China and just feeling so good about the impact I didn't know I had but I hoped I had , but only really found out when people would like find me either on the streets or at an event and be like you know , like I was

going to leave China . But he really helped me like learn the language , or at least motivated me to learn the language . He really helped me like learn the language , or at least motivated me to learn the language . Like this one guy who he went from like what was going to be the typical not learn mandarin chinese at all to .

He started like going out to karaoke with his call , his chinese colleagues , right when he when it was really uncomfortable because he didn't have much language , but he started bonding with them . It made like the whole work experience better .

He ended up yeah , he ended up finding a girlfriend and then they ended up getting quite serious and now what he thought was going to be just a you know , like one contract sort of deal , like he's in China and ultra passionate about living there , and this is now seven years later .

So it's just really cool when you can do what you're passionate about and realize that the moment you realize it changes somebody's life . Of course I don't nobody's told me that they didn't take their life because they learned Mandarin , chinese , but dang somebody said that to you . Wow .

Actually , there's a statistic that says , at any given time , there's 75,000 people that need to hear your message , specifically from you , just based off of the math of the amount of people in the world .

And so what I always say is like how selfish of you not to share , right , like to be able to share what you've been through and what you've been able to overcome , even if you feel like it's minute right , like it could really spark something great inside of somebody else . And so might as well just be open and share . And so I .

That's why I love sharing the stories of me falling on my face and messing up and you know being able to adjust and and , and you know adjust your sales and and and go on to the next adventure . And so for me , like , yeah , it's been no-transcript .

, so .

We'll do the captions , we'll put in some B roll if they're interested all that stuff and when we launched it grew really fast . In the beginning I found a way to make it super affordable for people . A lot of those services were $500 , $600 , $700 a month , if not more , for people to get those clips .

We're at like $150 , $300 a month , depending on what package you want . So it grew rather quickly and so for the first couple of months we were rolling . We launched in January of last year and then come June there was a major disruption . It might have been May . There's a website that blew up .

Now they'd been around longer , but they finally figured some stuff out because obviously AI is taking over the world . There's a website called CapShow , which is a great website .

It's a great tool for podcasters where you literally drop in your video and it will find the clips for you , it'll tell you which ones they think will perform better and they'll edit it for you .

And so , obviously , overnight , when you go from this person's paying $300 a month and now I can pay $29 a month and get more clips than what I'm getting , that's a no brainer . And so we had to really kind of look at things and I was like , okay , we've got two , we've got two options here .

Right , we can either shut it down , which would be fine , except I really like my partner who's over in India , who he deserves to make a good living for himself , and we were really doing that for him . And I was like , well , how do we , how do we figure this out ?

And so what we did was we pivoted and we started to target seven figure business owners , specifically with large following online , because they care much more about the content and the quality of the content they're putting out versus what AI can put out for them .

And so I use as an example you know , I just recently , recently had kurt angle on my podcast too , if you're not . He's an olympic gold medalist , wwe hall of famer , amazing story , an amazing person . Well , obviously , if I create a clip with him , I want to use b-roll of him wrestling in a wrestling ring .

I want to use b-roll of him crying after he won the gold medal . A I can't do that for you . So my team is able to go in and go to YouTube and go to Google and find all these clips and utilize that right .

So we are able to really really I like the way you put it right it's more of a boutique type of service where anybody who really really cares about their content that they're putting out , podbrand is the better option than Capshow and again , capshow is a fine option , but if you're looking for something more specific , podbrand is obviously able to help you with

that . But that shift had to happen and we're not quite back to where we were , but we're doing just fine .

I'm not sure how it works in the podcast world , but for sure when I started using AI software or my video editor did start using AI software to pull out highlights , like many people do , and then publish those AI generated highlights video format vertical video format on Instagram , like the views were so low , and then I was like , okay , just do this manually .

Now , Ken , that's my podcast editor .

Take us we're jumping around here , but take us back to a time in your business journey where you had a setback and you were ready to throw in the towel .

And I go up rather poor , Like I remember seeing my mom's car get repossessed and you know , things like that happened in my life and I go well , I've been poor before , I could be poor again and I'll try and figure it out . So there was never a sense of like , oh , I'm going to throw in the towel . It's just how you know .

It's just those pivoting moments , right , those finding out what else I need to do . Covid was was rough . I wasn't ready to throw in the towel , but I certainly went through I think this word gets thrown around too much but a bit of depression or sadness which really affected me in many ways , and so that was a really tough time .

But I continued to push through and what I realized is , when my back is up against the wall , I put myself in a position purposefully , that I have to take action . So , for instance , I told that story about Mike Kim . So this instance was okay .

I lost 80% of my income , Like I was making like the same kind of money that 19 year old Justin made right , Like working selling cell phones . And so I was like , what am I going to do ? So I paid a coach a lot of money to help me figure this out .

Like I wasn't making any money and I invested a ton in myself to figure it out , because now I'm even more in a situation where I have to take massive action Right now . I , you , Now , you could talk about these things now , almost five years later , and say it seemed easy , but it was really difficult , it was really stressful .

I am fortunate enough to have a very , very supportive and loving wife who will put up with me as I go through these stressful times , Thank God . But yeah , man , it was difficult . It was more difficult emotionally than just because I'm not somebody who throws in the towel . It's just that's just not my personality .

Like my family hates playing board games with me because I will ultimately just destroy all of them . Because I'm not , I'm not throwing in the towel , I don't care if you're 11 , right , like I'm winning , and so . So , yeah , it's , that's just my own personality . But there are certainly tough times in COVID . Covid , for sure was was really really tough .

Starting out was really really tough just because you know , just like anybody else , right You're , you're a broke entrepreneur when you start out , I don't care where , like who you are you start out broke and you're broke for a while . But yeah , I would say those two moments for sure , but at the same time it was .

You know , it's just what's the next , what's the next thing , no matter what bad things are going to happen , you just have to learn how to adjust . And I think you know I think Ed Milet was the first guy to say that , everybody says it but life is not what's . It's not happening to me , it's happening for me .

And so when I can have that mindset , whenever something seems to fall apart , that is when I can really kind of be proactive in how I react to those things .

for me . When you shared about your mom , that brought up something that , like I even forgot , but like times were quite difficult for my mom for most of her life . But when we were going up , my mom for most of her life .

But when we were going up , my sister Abby , and her sister she's younger than me by four years I specifically remembered and tried to hold back tears .

But when we were living with my mom after my parents got divorced and I was in seventh grade and this lady had given us pretty cheap rent and so we we had moved to another side of town , much more expensive , and my sister and I were in a good school over there .

I was seventh grade , so she was like in fourth or fifth grade , something like that , and we had done . How did this story work ? We lived with my dad for a time . My mom lived out of her car until she could put in , like put things together a little better , and then we really wanted to stay with her .

So somehow she was able to find like an extra bedroom or two in a house in this much nicer neighborhood .

And so I'm in this really good middle school , my sister's in like a pretty solid elementary school , and my sister and I were doing the thing that apparently all kids do I was just talking to you about this this morning like not all kids are like punk kids , but Jamie's like apparently a lot of kids are .

Um , so my sister and I had a fight because I was definitely a punk older brother , but this fight got a little out of control .

We ended up throwing some things and , uh , breaking some stuff in the house and the lady who was super kind , but she had had like enough , was just like told my mom that we were gonna have to get out of the house , and so my mom literally told us that like , if we don't get back together , we're gonna be living out of a car .

And I remember , like shoot , that was just one of those difficult moments again so's thanks for just sharing a little bit about how you said your mom battled with opioids , and then you mentioned something about your mom again , and it seems like you took this and really were able to motivate a lot of other people with it .

It's absolutely mind blowing to me and I don't know , I don't know what you believe in .

I believe that you know , obviously our spirit lives on in some way , shape or form , and I've had a number of mediums on the show , all of which have told me that my mother approves of me sharing her journey and so you know , including Gabby Bernstein saying that to me , and so from from me , like that , that means the world to me , knowing that she is happy

with the fact that we're changing so many lives , even though in the her as a person , she couldn't get a hold of her own life . Now she , you know she's she's pleased with the fact that she's helping so many other lives , which is great .

I mean , I'm a pretty traditional Christian and so I would not go as far as to say is that like God put my mom in that situation because I don't believe he does that to people but at the same time , like he definitely gave us the strength to persevere and my mom is still around and I don't I didn't ask her permission to share , to share this but at the

same time , you know , like it really does touch me when I see her , despite all of the , let's just say , egregious things that she's had to go through in her life , yet she's still like positive , she still retains at 70 years age , you know , she still retains like tons of hope in her future , like she's still full of faith and willing to encourage like anybody

who's going through a downtime , and she's just like a pleasant person to many people that she lives around . And so I guess all that is to say is shout out to our moms .

You know , collaborating directly , promoting podcast marketing you have posited and experienced and taught lots of people that is not the right way to grow your podcast , but actually building a solid brand is , and so I would love for you to unpack that Before you do share a quick bit about Growth Now Summit Live , because I will be linking that up in the show

notes below so somebody can find out more about it .

And so the way to get around those people is to get in the room . Amazing speaker lineup . Obviously , the people who've already bought tickets are all amazing human beings . Even if I don't know them personally , I know that they're amazing human beings because they're committing to their own growth . But yeah , it's a ton of fun .

Come hang out , come learn from the speakers , come connect . Come give me a high five . I used to say give me a hug , but I don't actually like hugs . So we'll go , come give me a high five and we'll get to hang out and we'll get to have a good time .

Not in the way you thought , but if you're part of that 80% that is having fewer than 100 downloads per episode , click on over because you're going to want to get more downloads per episode . And , justin , thank you for being here . Thank you so much .