Change can be scary, but it can also be good. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked to Nathaniel Desantis ‘19 about how his entrepreneurial path has evolved from the multimedia company, Amalfi Media, to now Podcast Studio X. Desantis shares how the growth of his personal podcast company is now helping others tell their stories. We discuss how failure can be rewarding, and how it’s important to always be willing to learn.

Guest: Nathaniel DeSantis '19 - Owner Podcast Studio X 

Host: Mary Sturgill

Producer: Isabella Martinez '24

 

Transcript: 

MARY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host, Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that is created through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University and we are right in the middle of a very special kind of summer season if you will, of the Class E Podcast where we're having current students and not so recent graduates. Well, some recent graduates… four years ago, is that right? Yeah, four years ago, so recent graduates who are entrepreneurs in their own right, and so our special guest today is Nathaniel DeSantis. Nathaniel, welcome back.

 NATHANIEL: Thank you for having me back on again.

 MARY: Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: For those of you who don’t know, this is my second time on the podcast.

 MARY: Yeah, so I had Nathaniel on… what, two years ago? Right when you started.

 NATHANIEL: It was like a year and a half, two years ago.

 MARY: Yeah, so at that time you were running Amalfi Media…

 NATHANIEL: Correct.

 MARY: And Amalfi Media has gone through several iterations since our conversation and so I'm excited to kind of catch up with you and learn about the growth of what's happened since then. So, tell everyone… go watch… one go watch or listen actually, it's listen to at that point because we didn't have our YouTube channel yet. So, go listen to that podcast with Nathaniel about Amalfi Media because I want you to see how much his company’s grown from then to now. It's crazy.

 NATHANIEL:  It's changed a lot.

 MARY: And in a pandemic.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, well that was probably part of it.

 MARY: Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: It truly has changed.

 MARY: So give everyone a brief description of what the first iteration was.

 NATHANIEL: Like Amalfi Media? Okay so Amalfi Media was just a digital media company. The whole point was we would make our own podcasts and it was primarily podcasts. I think we had one YouTube channel.

 MARY: Yeah, your mom had a YouTube channel.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. We would make our own content and put it out there and the goal was to monetize this podcast. So that was like the one of the company. And it was going pretty well. But as I think I discussed on the previous episode I was on, I quit my manufacturing job to do that.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: And it got to a point where I was like, okay, I need to make money.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: I need to survive.

 MARY: Like everybody thought you were crazy when you said I'm leaving this job after a year and I'm starting this company.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah.

 MARY: Right?

 NATHANIEL: And like the shows that we were producing were growing very well. But the writing was on the wall that it would take maybe two, three years for it to get to a point where I could sustain myself and all the hosts that were doing the shows, which kind of led to V2 of the company which is it fine to go into that now?

 MARY: Yeah, absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: So V2 was the Greenville Podcast Company because what happened was at the end of Amalfi Media I shut it… I closed Amalfi Media LLC so legally it's no longer an entity anymore. I asked what did I do well, and what did I not do well, and we would always get compliments on our production work. People would always say like that sounds really professional.

 MARY: You guys have great productions. And listen to his voice everybody. Oh my goodness okay.

 NATHANIEL: Good genetics, I guess. So the production value is really good and people would always compliment us on that. So I said, well, we'll work on just being a production company specifically focused on podcasts. And again, like I said, I focused on what I did wrong as well. And a lot of it was I think, when new entrepreneurs, especially young ones, because I was like 21, 22 when I started. No 22, 23 when I started, young entrepreneurs, I think they have this idea like oh, like it's just gonna like be huge, and it's gonna blow up and it's gonna be…

 MARY: Immediately.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, exactly. It's gonna be this huge thing. So I took a step back and I didn't focus on like names or anything. I said, we'll just call it the Greenville Podcast Company to start with and we'll produce and let's just see, let's see if we get any clients. Eventually, we did get clients so that turned into us producing content, specifically podcasts for nonprofits, like Greater Good Greenville is one really good example. They have a podcast called Simple Civics Greenville County, but then we do things for larger corporations like Johnson and Johnson. So we're really hitting kind of like the companies and using it as PR and marketing for them. And it got to a point where a month ago… so this is like fresh…we decided to change it to Podcast Studio X because…

 MARY: Yeah. And how did that change come about?

 NATHANIEL: So we kind of again, I started through Greenville Podcast Company right after Amalfi Media shut down and I said I'm not gonna go in thinking this is going to be huge.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: I'm just gonna keep it local to start with and it has grown really well. And the problem we're running into is that people outside of Greenville are like, why would I use the Greenville Podcast Company?

 MARY: Oh, right.

 NATHANIEL: And a big emphasis of ours is on remote production. So we only have two clients that we actually go to in their office. The rest are remote, still make it sound really good, still really good quality. So, you know, we took a look. And we said, what do we want to name the company so that people can look at it in California.

 MARY: From anywhere. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. They can look in Europe and be like, wow, well, they just do podcasts. And this is actually the reason is Podcast Studio X is very specific because we… Google has a really cool ad tool where you can do like this keyword search, and you can see what keywords are people Googling and so my sister and I, we made a list of like 500 keywords related to podcast production be it remote podcast production or podcast studio or this that the other, right? Anything with podcasts and production work, we put them into Google and we saw what performed the best with search and podcast studio was the highest ranking one so it got something like 20,000 monthly searches for just podcast studio, whereas podcast production only got like 100 a month. 

 MARY: Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: So we're like okay, well, let's do it based on search.

 MARY: That’s smart. Does that come from your sister? She’s this marketing guru.

 NATHANIEL: I wish. This is a lesson learned from the Amalfi Media days and some advice from some really good mentors that I met along the way. That's actually what we do for our clients when it comes to their show titles. And so we looked through we're like well, let's just do it with this as well…the company name like if it works for the podcast, it will work for the company name. And so my sister and I, this is where my sister comes in, her and I are brainstorming names and we're like, okay, it has to have podcast studio in it, right? And she's like, she texts me Podcast Studio X and she meant that as like a placeholder, but as in like, fill in the blank. Again, like what are we gonna put it in for the X and I just saw and I was like, I love it. It’s sick. Great idea. You got it. You got the company name.

 MARY: Well and that fits because you create podcasts for all these different companies.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. It just happened to work really well. And it's one of those things. So you know, we looked for the domain and it was there and it’s like, great, this is perfect. Now we don't have to worry about it for a long time. So that's the long story of how we went from Amalfi Media…

 MARY: The evolution.

 NATHANIEL: …to Greenville to Podcast Studio X.

 MARY: Well, and the reason I wanted you to talk about that was so many entrepreneurs… what their initial idea is not how it ends, right?

 NATHANIEL: Yeah.

 MARY: And so you had this initial idea with Amalfi Media and then you saw the potential and the need for a podcast production company because so many people are wanting to get into podcasts, but they don't have the skills, right?

 NATHANIEL: Exactly.

 MARY: They don't know what equipment they need or you know all of this stuff or where they should host or anything like that. So you're filling that niche for them. And I think that's great. So how do you get your clients?

 NATHANIEL: So a few ways. First of all, we actually just hired our first salesman, salesperson I should say. So he does a lot of cold calling and cold email outreach. We have a target audience that is businesses and nonprofits because we found that podcasts are great PR marketing tools. We thought personally and it’s a little biased… I think it should be around 70% of what you do for marketing. The other… you know the rest of the percentage, you do whatever you want with that. But I think 70% of your marketing and PR should be podcasts.

 MARY: Because if you look at the number of podcast listeners in the United States, but also around the world, it's not going… it's seen a seven-year… huge growth in the past seven years and each year keeps growing and growing.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah. And also the way that we look at podcasts and it's our job to try to explain this to potential clients is that you can repurpose it in so many ways. So you're doing a video podcast. We’re on video. Your YouTube's covered, you don't have to worry about YouTube anymore. Using that video, you can now chop that into clips and now your Instagram, your Tik Tok, your Twitter, your YouTube shorts, your Facebook, it's all covered. Turn these episodes into transcripts. Now your blog strategy’s covered and then you have them on the audio platforms as well. So that's something we really have to hammer home to potential clients. This is used for a lot of different things. It's… a lot of people think of a podcast as just talking, it's not. You can repurpose that. So it's our job to help potential clients understand that.

 MARY: And that's efficiency, right? Because you're sitting down for maybe 30, maybe 45 minute podcast and you have that much content that.. yes, you're gonna produce it as a podcast in its entirety, but you also have that content that you could chop out and use for other things depending on what their marketing that week, right?

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. So to go back to your question, how do we find clients? Part of its referrals. So obviously we have a new salesperson but part of it is… we work with people and they have guests come on and then their guests say my company wants a podcast too. We really enjoyed working with Podcast Studio X, you guys were super professional. We want you. Part of it is connections, honestly. So I think Furman is a great example of like good connections. You just happen… you meet people in your life at Furman who may or may not become lifelong friends, but they’re still connections that you'll have and when their company or their boss wants a podcast, they're more likely to think of you, right? That's helped with a few clients that we've gotten as well. Other times before we had a salesperson, I would just pick up the phone, I would call people. I'd say hey, does your company want a podcast? Just hope and pray that they would say yes. Then we also do this thing for all of our clients where if they say at the end of an episode, this was produced by Podcast Studio X and have that on their shows, they get a discount. And they also…we have a referral system that's new where they'll get a whole month of production for free if they do refer us to someone else.

MARY: Oh nice.

 NATHANIEL: So lots of avenues. Also with sales, we started doing more inbound marketing so we're pushing out five blogs a week.

 MARY: Yeah, wow.

 NATHANIEL: That's just good quality content that we're putting on our website, hoping that it draws people in and best case scenario we get a client, worst case they learned something valuable about podcasting.

 MARY: Yeah, for sure. So, you are… this is almost a subscription-type service, is it not?

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, it absolutely is for our clients. Yeah. We have yearly contracts with them. They do one episode every week or an episode every other week that we will produce for them. And it starts with a kickoff and training period where we kind of go into the logistics stuff like cover art. No one really thinks about that.

 MARY: So do you help… Do you help them not only with the actual podcast and the mechanics of the podcast itself, but with some of the marketing of it as well?

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, so they'll get clips with every episode.

 MARY: So it’s full service.

 NATHANIEL: Our motto and our slogan is, “You talk, we do the rest,” because that's really what it is.

 MARY: Nice.

 NATHANIEL: And when we do those sales calls, that's what we try to explain to those potential clients. We have two focuses…you have a professional brand, your podcast needs to reflect that.

 MARY: Right. 

 NATHANIEL: Because you know… have you ever heard those podcasts where it's like, wow, this is a big company, why does it sound so bad?

 MARY: Right. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: Right. You worked hard building your brand like your podcast should sound as good as your brand does.

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, so that's one thing. And then the second emphasis we always tell them is simplicity. So we want to make it super easy. And the example I always use with potential clients is we have some travel agents who are clients and they'll record on a cruise. We make it that easy for them that they can take their equipment… it's very mobile, very light, very easy to do. And they'll record on a cruise or when they're flying to Dublin like we've so many opportunities to make it easy, but still professional for them to do.

 MARY: Yeah, I love that.

 NATHANIEL: And yeah, so it really is full service. We have different packages so it kind of depends. And then we have add ons as well that they can subscribe to like they might only want a transcript with the basic package as well or they might want social media management for two channels so kind of depends. Everyone's a little bit different. But yeah, it's really full service for them.

 MARY: That's amazing. I think that's… I think you're filling a niche that not a lot of people even knew existed, maybe because everybody thinks everybody just grabs a microphone and starts talking.

 NATHANIEL: It sounds easy to do.

 MARY: It does.

 NATHANIEL: Everyone thinks how hard can it be to start a podcast until you actually look into it and you're like, oh, actually a lot of steps involved to it. There are two of you doing this one right now.

 MARY: And we’re really shorthanded. We really… I mean we have if you're in the studio, then you would see that we have three cameras right now. And we have the… basically the audio board that Isabella, our producer, is recording everything into so she's running all of that for us right now to make sure that we have the best quality possible.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. And so there are a lot of steps that go into it. And they’re a lot of things that I… you just don't think of unless you do podcasts daily. So like one thing that I'll share with the world here, one of our secrets, so we call it maximizing milliseconds or the millisecond framework just depending on who we're talking to. So everything for us, like cover art, people need to be able to look at it and immediately understand this is what your podcast is about. And the second thing is they need to understand that it’s a very professionally done podcast based on the cover art because they have milliseconds to decide based on that… am I gonna listen to the episode? So it goes… the flow is the cover art, if they liked that, in that millisecond, they'll go on to look at the episode title. If they like that, they'll look at the episode description. If they like that, they'll hit play, and that's what we're trying to maximize for is hitting play and things like that, that if you don't do it daily, you don't think about how do I maximize that millisecond with a title and description for a podcast or with the cover art. So there's a lot that goes into it. 

 MARY: And it's super interesting. I mean, we're in the podcast business so of course, it's interesting to us, but I think that any business I think could take a podcast and that's kind of like a microcosm look at how they market themselves, right? Do you get what I'm saying? Because if you could look at this podcast, this artwork, this title, right? This kind of promo paragraph that we put with all of our podcasts, and did that lead this many people to actually listen to the podcast? How long did they listen to the podcast? And that lets you know whether you're being effective or not?

 NATHANIEL: Exactly.

 MARY: Right? I mean, the numbers are right there, right? Yeah. Yeah. So how many… I mean, this is time…it's time consuming to produce a podcast and do all the marketing. I know you have your sister working with the marketing. She's an expert in that area. You're the expert podcaster. And then you just hired a salesperson, is it still just the three of you or are you…?

 NATHANIEL: We also have an intern from Furman.

 MARY: Oh yeah.

 NATHANIEL: And then we have another intern as well. So the Furman intern, she does marketing, so she's helping out with that. And then the other intern just graduated from high school I was…I mentored him during a senior project he had to do. And at the end of his year after he graduated, I was like, well, do you want an internship? And so he's doing the production side of things. Besides that, yeah, that's kind of the whole team is like the five… five or six of us.

 MARY: You guys are busy.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah.

 MARY: Yeah. So what is your vision for the company now that you’re at this point of it?

 NATHANIEL: Right. That's a really good question. So I know sales wise, our vision is to get at least six more clients within the next four months. We'd really like to bring that up.

 MARY: Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: …which we think is very doable. I know our sales guy already has like five calls booked for next week. So, will those five calls all turn into sales? I don't think so. I think maybe one. Exactly.

 MARY: If we look at the normal percentages.

 NATHANIEL: It's a numbers game.

 MARY: It is. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: So we would like sales wise to get six more. And at that point, we would bring on… I don't know, I don't know if it's a full-time producer, but in some capacity and other producers to help with that workload.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: We really are working on kind of standardizing business, because this is something that you don't really learn unless you get into the weeds of being an entrepreneur, but if you want your business to grow, you have to be able to do it without you.

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: I'm not saying I want to one day depart from my company, let it just run on its own.

 MARY: But at some point, you have to step away for a vacation or something.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. You need to be able to take two weeks off. The company's not gonna burn down. So we're lucky we're at a point where we're having a steady flow of income. We have a good set of clients. We have more that we think will come on. And before we get too large, we kind of want to standardize business so that it can operate without us and so that when we do need to expand, we're not caught off guard.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: So a lot of right now is like we just hope that we can work under like standard operating procedures and training targets that we're building out. But I mean, ultimately long term, it's a really good question. I don’t know if I have a specific answer.

 MARY: I mean, I can see the exponential growth on this because mostly, this is a great, like we've said, a great marketing tool for companies and for nonprofits and it's an easy one for nonprofits to get into because it is lower cost than other ways of marketing, right? And you have the potential to reach so many more people as well than if you were just you know, get a PSA spot on the local news.

NATHANIEL: And then you can do it from your couch if you wanted to.

 MARY: Exactly.

 NATHANIEL: So that makes it easy. I would say long term… I think we want to branch out with… still within the podcast industry, but we kind of have our own network built in now, right? The more podcast clients that we get, the more attractive we are to advertisers.

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: And we can bundle all of our podcasts together and offer those hosts advertising opportunities. So I know that's something we want to get into. Obviously getting more clients and just kind of expanding the company… getting more… I know it'd be great if we could get like 100 clients one day, and produce 100 podcasts. And I do think there's part of our strategy that does involve doing some original content again, so throwback to like Amalfi Media.

 MARY: Right. Amalfi. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: So doing some of our own podcasts Studio X branded content with the purpose of attracting potential clients as a sales strategy. That doesn't mean they're going to be really gimmicky and like here's why you need a podcast but actually really good content, but just produced by Podcast Studio X. So then people can look it up and be like, oh, like they made that podcast. Yes. Yeah. Cool. Okay, well, maybe they'll make my podcast.

 MARY: I will tell you a friend of mine, who is a reporter for Forbes, has a book out there called the one person…one person company. One million dollar one person companies, something like that. I'm probably butchering that title. But you get the gist. And every single one of them is educational companies, online education companies.

 NATHANIEL: Really? Interesting.

 MARY: Yeah, so that's kind of the arm that you're talking about there. That kind of educational kind of arm of this is how you could be doing this.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah exactly. That’s really fascinating.

 MARY: Yeah. Yeah. It's super interesting. And it's a subscription-based type of thing. That's why I asked the subscription based thing question because subscription…if it's subscription-based, you don't have to worry about necessarily reselling until the end of the year. And then it's also kind of automatic as well, right? So for instance, my yoga guru has… we pay $25 a month, and I figured out what he's making based on all of us who… and I did it conservatively, to be a part of his academy, right? And all of these are online classes and whatnot, and it's ridiculous like what he's doing it from and he just tapes his normal yoga classes in the town where he is and then gives talks and things like that. And then by paying that membership fee, then we get, you know, access to all of that, and it's a smart way to go. So smart when you're doing things like this. 

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, unfortunately, for what we do is very specialized. So…

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: …we can’t charge $25 for it.

 MARY: No. Exactly. Yeah. This is… I'm talking $25 a month and then you get access to free classes. This is not like that at all. Yeah. 

 NATHANIEL: But no subscriptions definitely…

 MARY: That’s like a gym membership, right?

 NATHANIEL: Yeah. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs like need to find ways to make that revenue recurring.

 MARY: Exactly.

 NATHANIEL: Because otherwise, like if you sell something for just 25 bucks, you're always chasing that next client.

 MARY: Exactly.

 NATHANIEL: And part of it is we should always chase our next client. So we're not going to stop if we get to like 20.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: But you know, you need to make sure that you have income coming in, you have revenue coming in. And finding out your pricing is super difficult too like figuring that out is so challenging. It took us a long time to figure out what are our prices. Yeah, we were facing some consequences because of that.

 MARY: Right. If you're…and that's a thing that I think creatives and you are creative, sometimes have a hard time pricing ourselves appropriately.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. Yeah. I always advise people, to go higher. Go higher than what you expect, whatever the number is, in your mind, triple or quadruple it. And the framework that we used when we were figuring out our new pricing… and we have three different tiers, the lowest starting at 2990 seconds at 4990 and then 16,990, something like that, what we did was we imagined the company has reached its full potential, right? We have 100 clients, what are all the processes that need to be filled out? What are all the key members, the employees that we need? And then the price is based on that. So we might not be there right now but if we do get to that point, right, we don't want to be caught behind because we were pricing too low in the past. And we've actually found that it resonates better with the clients that we have, the new pricing because I think there's a psychological component where you're paying so much that's like, well, you know, I'm getting my money's worth and you are with us. That's the thing. It's not like tricky. 

 MARY: And here's the thing, the numbers show, right? The numbers are going to show what… whether that's worth it or not. Right and so yeah, it's not I'm throwing this money at this, you know, wild marketing scheme, and I have no way to measure whether it's working or not, right? You do with podcasting for sure. What's been the most rewarding part of starting this company or going through this iteration?

 NATHANIEL: The most rewarding part. That is a great question. I find it very rewarding to do things in the local community. So we have a lot of nonprofits from Greenville that we work with.

 MARY: Yeah, I love that.

 NATHANIEL: That is really cool to see the impact and one of our nonprofits about local civics like the podcast that they make about local civics…not many people get like too jazzed when you hear…

 MARY: The word civics.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah exactly. That's not too enthusiastic a genre. Yet, we've reached 70,000 people. I think we just surpassed that the other day.

 MARY: Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: And that’s really cool.

 MARY: That’s amazing. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: To know people are having an impact from a local civics podcast that brings elected officials on and local leaders, things like that. So having an impact in Greenville, because I've lived here 18 years now, has been really cool. I always wanted to be involved in Greenville somehow.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: So to do that is awesome. It's very rewarding to meet all these cool people we interview also. That's something I mean, you have like let's say we're at like seven clients and they each do a podcast a week. That's a lot of people you're meeting every week.

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: They're all guest based podcasts. That’s a lot of people. Some of them are very cool people. Some are…very interesting people.

 MARY: Some are like trying to pull teeth, trying to pull information out. But yeah.

 NATHANIEL: And I would say the failure aspect has been very rewarding because it’s… no one likes to fail.

 MARY: Oh, it makes you better at your job.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. If you can learn from your failure though, that’s really cool. I’'ll be the first one that I fail a lot. I still fail regularly.

 MARY: We all do. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: Exactly. And the sooner you can learn from your failure. Like what I was saying when I switched from Amalfi Media to the Greenville Podcast Company and then Podcast Studio X, the sooner you can learn from that I mean, the better you will be…your business will be. I found a lot of rewards in the failure. And also just you know, the fact that we're actually bringing money in has been very rewarding. You know, a business model that works like it's something that sounds really silly, but it's very rewarding. The company that's actually doing things and hiring people and bringing interns in and expanding.

 MARY: Yeah, and I… listeners, I hope you and those of you watching on YouTube, I hope you get that from this conversation is that I think you're such a good representation of some of what entrepreneurs go through sometimes is, you know, you have this idea for this company, and then you pivot based on what you're what you're learning, what you're discovering, and you keep pivoting until you come to the iteration that actually, you know, begins to make you money and begins to be, you know, profitable and that's where you are right now.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, and I think a lot of people quit early.

 MARY: I think they do too.

 NATHANIEL: A lot of people quit at that Amalfi Media phase. You hit your first failure and say well, I guess I am a failure of an entrepreneur. If you look at… sure I think a lot of people would love to be Steve Jobs or Zuckerburg or  Bill Gates where your first thing is going to be a hit. But if you look at I think the founder of Starbucks is a great example…I can't remember his name… it took him like 10 times to be successful. Ten times of failing and trying and failing and trying until he got something that worked. You have to be willing to do that ten times. Maybe still even failing that tenth time.

 MARY: Yeah. And still getting the naysayers on board. I think of Sara Blakely, with Spanx, and all of the people who told her there's no room in this business for this and of course, they were men and she's like, no, I swear there is, right? I’m a woman. We need these.

 NATHANIEL: Yeah, I saw her post on Linkedin. It's very inspiring.

 MARY: It’s super inspiring. So when you get to that point where you have to make that pivot, I agree. Most people I won't say most but many people kind of bail at that point and they're like, okay, I've got to go get a real job. I have a family or whatever. But I think you're right, if you just keep learning from each little step of the way, and do what you're doing, then there you're going to see the fruit of your labor.

 NATHANIEL: And also I think another big tip is to ground yourself in reality. I was guilty of being…

 MARY: High in the sky.

 NATHANIEL: Sometimes you know, you don't have a $10 million angel investor with you.

 MARY: Right.

 NATHANIEL: And you might have to start small and build your way up to being your own $10 million investor. But you know, be grounded in reality. That's a big one, I wish I had told myself that a long time ago.

 MARY: Yeah. All right. One last piece of advice maybe that you have for our listeners.

 NATHANIEL: One last piece of advice, I would say, well, it depends. Is this like… who's your target audience… other entrepreneurs or just?

 MARY: Students who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs. Anyone who's thinking about beginning a small business…

 NATHANIEL: I would say that the most important thing, at the end of the day, is your ability to learn. Because no one teaches you…

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: …how to run a business. No one taught me personally how to produce podcasts. No one teaches you half the things I do on a daily basis. So you have to have a willingness to learn. Don't go into it thinking that you know it all because I think that's gonna set you up for failure more than anything else. 

 MARY: I agree with that. Yeah.

 NATHANIEL: And yeah learning is just super important. Learn from a variety of topics too. Don't just get so specific on your niche or your genre that you don't want anything else. I think there's a lot of value in reading and studying other businesses like

 MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: For example, there's a great book called Bitter Brew. It's about the downfall of the Anheuser-Busch family. There are so many nuggets of wisdom that you can learn by reading that. It has nothing to do with podcasting,but it's just value and seeing…how did they rise? How did they fall? And so learn.

MARY: Bitter Brew. I always love it when people give book suggestions to our tour audience. I love that. 

NATHANIEL: Another really good one, unrelated to business, but I think everyone should read is My Early Life by Winston Churchill, one of the best authors that I've read. So that's a really good one and then the Leonardo da Vinci Biography by Walter Isaacson. We're going on to book reviews now. 

MARY: We could do a whole book review podcast.

 NATHANIEL: Listen to Books and Looks is one of the podcasts that we produce that just does book reviews.

MARY: Books and Looks.

NATHANIEL: And interviews the authors. 

MARY:  Oh, I'm gonna have to have you…I'm gonna have to get on that podcast when I publish my book. So yeah, I just, yeah, I'm gonna have to do that. All right. I learn so much from you every time you're on here and, you know, I've been in the broadcast business for 20 plus years now and I swear every time I talk to Nathaniel I learn something. So thank you so much for joining us.

NATHANIEL: Thank you for having me and can I get a little promo? 

MARY: Absolutely.

 NATHANIEL: Check out Podcast Studio X. It’s this podcaststudiox.com. Look at our services. See if any of that interests you or if you know anyone it might interest, let us know.

MARY: And that's exactly what I was gonna tell everybody to do. See, he's such a pro. Nathaniel, thank you so much.

 MARY: That does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. Listeners, thank you so much for listening. If you're watching on YouTube, thank you as well. We appreciate it. This podcast is produced through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. It is produced by student producer Isabella Martinez, who is in charge of all of these cameras, as we talked about and everything that's going on in the studio today. So make sure that you comment on the podcast and give her kudos for her good work when you listen to or watch this podcast. But for now, I'm your host, Mary Sturgill. Until next time everybody, dream big.