Mads Singers Management Podcast

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.

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 members. He also holds a small portfolio of affiliate websites.

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), Authority Builders (a backlink service), Search Initiative (a client-facing SEO agency), Affiliate Lab (a course that teaches the background of the services that Leadspring offers, for the DIY type), and Chiang Mai SEO (during times when gathering in numbers is permitted).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 continued to grow and scale a remote company.

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.

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.

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.

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 some things he could leverage into making his own agency, and now, a few years later, he’s got a team of 25 at Content Distribution, helping clients rank on page 1 for tens of thousands of keywords.

My guest for this episode Mads Singers Management Podcast is someone who knows that in her core. Jocelyn Kopac, like me, started her first business in her childhood. I sold strawberries; she sold farm fresh eggs to city-dwellers from Chicago who were enjoying the countryside. Jocelyn is a serial entrepreneur and business strategist who works specifically in the DEI field: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. In this vein she helps entrepreneurs build and develop an inclusive company culture as well as have crucial conversations with those members of the team who may not understand the importance of DEI.

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 degree is in wildlife, in which he was in charge of water management, he ended up building a business and growing it from 3-12 employees. He now works as a financial coach, helping people with their budgets.

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 spent some years in the corporate world before starting her own business.