Episode 148 - Podcasting for Capital | The Raising Capital Show with Nate Dodson & Dave Dubeau

We've been working exclusively with syndicators and fund managers and helping them to connect with about 20 accredited investors every month by leveraging their own podcast. Thanks for joining. Mate Dodson here with the Capital Raising Show. And today we're going to actually talk about an important area that really just maximizes your ability to expand the awareness so investors know who you are, to show your authority of why they actually want to invest with you.

And I'm talking today to Dave DeBow, who has his own unique style of finding investors. Dave, want to take a second and introduce yourself. Nate, thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah, I'm up here in beautiful British Columbia, Canada.

I've been in the real estate game one way or the other since 2003. And for the last dozen years or so, I've been working a lot, pretty much exclusively with capital raisers, helping them to connect with investors and raise private capital. And for the last, oh, since early 2024. So that's our main focus these days, Nate.

I like it. Well, podcasts, we all hear about them. There's 10... We're on one right now for crying out loud.

No, you nailed it. But it is like getting them started and rolling. Let me ask you a few kind of deeper questions about that. Yeah.

Do you really start with having your own podcast or do you kind of help and coach and guide people to getting on others' podcasts? And we're talking about from inception. I know there's other goals as you gain success and awareness. Yeah, for us, we have, for the lack of a better term, an agency.

So we have kind of a done for you service where we actually build a podcast for our syndicator client. We get all the techie stuff set up. We work with them on who their avatar is. We fill up their calendar with interviews with those people.

And then we do all of the production techie stuff behind the scenes and release their episodes. So basically we make it as easy as possible, Nate. So they basically just show up on Zoom with a clean shirt and a smile. And their number one job is to remember to hit record and have a good conversation.

All of the tech stuff is taken care of. Now, to answer the other part of your question, which comes first, the chicken and the egg? Do you want to be a guest first and then be a host? That's not a bad idea.

I mean, a lot of the people that we work with have some experience being a guest on other people's podcasts. and that's great. Now we show them how to leverage a podcast, do it slightly differently, avoid making all the dumb mistakes I made early days starting my own show, and really monetize their podcast very, very quickly. And that makes sense.

And I know it is scaling it is one of the most important things so that you don't produce a podcast and it goes into the stratosphere of the black hole, I guess. I respectfully almost disagree a little bit there, Nate. So yeah, it's kind of fun, but I'll tell you my backstory, right? So when I started my podcast, which is called the Property Profits Real Estate Podcast, which I've had the pleasure of having you on as a guest, I was kind of copying everybody else, right?

And that was, okay, all the big guys in the space have their own podcast or YouTube shows or whatever. I guess I should too. So I started one And I was trying to create this huge audience. So I was trying to interview the Robert Kiyosakis, the Grant Cardones.

Didn't have much luck doing that, but trying to get those kind of guys on the show. And my goal was, hey, if I get really, really big names on the show, I'm going to grow an audience. And hopefully some of those audience members will clue in that I'm a reasonably intelligent person. And hopefully they'll figure out how to get a hold of me.

And hopefully I'll end up doing some business. So there was a heck of a lot of hope. There were a lot of hopefully's and fingers crossed. A lot of hope and not much happening, right?

So I was doing the normal thing, you know, one show a week or every two weeks when I got around to it. And then the pain in the butt of producing everything and then hoping that, you know, we had a pretty good audience growth. And it was very hit and miss. Like it worked a little bit, but it was a lot of vanity metrics.

Like if you get 10,000 downloads on an episode, hey, that's awesome. but if it doesn't really turn into that anything then what difference does it make right it's that that's it's people's attention spans are very very limited so then i did that for a while i did that for several years and it wasn't until about three years ago that i heard somebody way smarter than me on a podcast say hey you know instead of worrying so much about growing your audience and hoping to attract the right people in your audiences as customers or clients why don't you just go straight to the source and interview the people that you would like as your customer or your client.

Just interview those people, start the relationship, start the conversation, lead with the giving hand, give them value first by being on your platform, by being interviewed, by being featured, and then start the conversation about how you might be able to work together. And that's when the light bulb went off. And Nate, I just said, okay, I'm going to go all in on this So I went from doing onesie twosie episodes, you know, every week or two to at the height. And don't do this, folks, because it's crazy.

At the height, I was doing 25 to 30 interviews a week. That's painful. It was painful. Don't do that.

That's too much. But here's the thing. It worked. It worked very very well because if we think about it we zoom out You an entrepreneur right Yes you in law and you in real estate but you said very very wisely It all about the widget It what we offering what we working with right Most people who are self-employed or entrepreneurs or business owners or professionals, they're looking for exposure.

They're looking for a platform. They're looking for marketing. So when we provide them with a free opportunity to get that, we're leading with the giving hand. We're giving them value first.

And that creates a little bit of reciprocation there. That creates a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling, especially if you have a friendly kind of an interview, a friendly kind of podcast. It's just a great way to connect with people and start those relationships. So I did that for several years on my own.

And then in 2024, I decided, you know what? This would probably work really, really well for syndicators and fund managers. So that's when we started offering it as a turnkey done for your service as well. I like it.

So walk me through. Okay. It sounds wonderful. Everybody's been hearing podcasts is the way to go.

You need to have yours and get on them. You know, Hey, I agree with you that I need to take this path. What are those first few steps actually look like? Yeah.

Good question. So the first step, Nate, and I'd love your input on this, right? Cause you've worked with a gazillion syndicators. That's a big part of your legal business.

my thing is let's start with our investor avatar in mind so i'll give you an example nate one of our clients dr tudor franku is a medical doctor and a syndicator he's a medical doctor first and he's a syndicator as well so guess who he resonates really well with other doctors medical professionals right? So his show, we started that off with that avatar in mind. So his show is not about, hey, Tutor Franco, the amazing apartment building syndicator and why real estate's amazing and it's awesome.

No, it's Stellar Success Leveling Up for Medical Pros. That's the name of the show. Has nothing to do with real estate. There's nothing about that in the show because the goal of the show is to attract medical professionals as the guest, as the people he's going to feature and as the audience as well.

All right. So then Tudor gets, we get these, these folks booked in on Tudor's show. He has a great conversation with them and the conversations around professional success, personal success, financial success. So it's kind of broad strokes that way.

What are you doing? What are you doing that's working really well professionally? How do you match personal in your professional life? And then towards the end of the conversation, we start positioning it towards investing, right?

So Dr. Smith, a lot of people that are in your position are making very, very good income right now, but they have to work pretty hard for it. And looking ahead, they want to work less, but keep those earnings up. So some folks are getting into investments and different things like that.

What are your thoughts about that, Dr. Smith? Just get them talking about it on the podcast. Now, Twitter is not going to ram real estate down their throats or start making recommendations or anything.

He's just opening up the conversation. Does this make sense, Nate? It's really, yeah. You're not really even speaking to the person.

You're speaking to the audience and making it more relatable by who's actually on the show or getting interviewed. Exactly. So then Dr. Smith says he's doing whatever.

He's fooling around in crypto or he's trying a little bit of stocks and bonds or whatever he's doing or reinvesting everything back into his own clinic. Whatever he says, it doesn't really matter. And then at the end, after you're done the interview, you're still on the screen with the person kind of doing a little bit of housekeeping. Then Dr.

Franco turns around and says, Dr. Smith, great job with your clinic. Things are going really, really well. Now, you mentioned that you're starting to dabble a little bit with stocks and bonds.

Let me ask you something. how do you feel about the kind of returns you're getting with those investments, the stability of those investments, and the security of those investments? Is that something that you're 100% happy with? Or is there perhaps a little bit of room for improvement there?

What are they going to say? There's always room for improvement. Boom. Well, we're doing some really interesting things in alternative investing in apartment buildings with other busy medical professionals just like you, we're able to get them very, very solid returns on their money.

In some cases, even save them a lot on their taxes. Is that something you might be interested in taking a look at? Boom, get them booked into a follow-up discovery call. And then that's where you start the investment conversation.

Does that make sense, Nate? It definitely does. So I've got a different type of question and go on just to listening for your advice. Go for it.

How do you feel about there are the podcasts that they'll just literally run an ad for themselves? Yeah. Where it's more of a break in the middle. Here's a 15, 20 second ad versus, hey, reach out anytime or the Investor Attraction Academy.

Love to help you find some new investors as well. Reach out anytime. Like more of an organic or do you tend to like people like, here's an ad that's a good question i i've tried both but i haven't really tracked it that well to be perfectly frank with you in this case if you're going to do something i would suggest an ad because if you just kind of butted in with your conversation with the medical doctor pitching your own deal or whatever that's going to be weird and in fact our clients i recommend they don't have any ads, right?

Because again the object here we not that worried about audience growth Yes that happens It happens organically That great But my number one focus is the other person on the other end of that screen who i interviewing that's my goal 100 is to create that relationship make that person feel good look good sound good and then if it looks like there might be a match get that booked into a follow-up discovery call That's the goal there. That really makes perfect sense. In terms of growing that audience, do you recommend or help with your agency, kind of the ongoing marketing and expansion of that?

Or are you really just kind of borrowing your guest's audience as a more, again, organic way to grow your own podcast? The latter. We're definitely borrowing our guests audience as the organic way to grow the audience. Because here's the thing.

So for example, the Dr. Smith example, right? So we get Dr. Smith on the show.

Chances are, here's been my experience. Dr. Smith hasn't been interviewed before. Like most of these folks have never, ever been on a podcast before.

So it's kind of a big deal. It's a feather in their cap. So what we do is we take Dr. Smith's episode, his interview, and we slice and dice some short form videos from that, the reels with the cool kids club titles on them.

We provide that to Dr. Smith. We take the transcript of the show. We put it through good old ChatGPT.

We create a really good LinkedIn article for Dr. Smith talking about his appearance on the show and the highlights. We create a really good Facebook post, Instagram post, X post, you name it. We create all of these assets for the guest to make it super easy for them to get the word out and kind of strut their stuff and show off a little bit to their network.

Because guess what? Chances are Dr. Smith knows a lot of other medical professionals who may or may not be paying attention to what he's doing on social media. But those are the kind of folks we want to attract.

And then to talk to your point a little bit about the ads, we do it indirectly. So the beginning of the end of each podcast episode, there's an intro at the beginning and there's an outro at the end. And the outro says, hey, if you like the show and you're in this case, and you're a busy, successful medical professional and you'd like to be a guest on the show, please go to our website and book in to be a guest. So that's where we're kind of using an ad, not to sell our own thing, but again, to give value first, to create that relationship.

So let me ask you this though, because I mean, Dr. Smith is busy. He is not on social media. He is not posting things.

You'd be surprised for that particular client. He's on episode 144. He does on average four interviews per week with qualified medical professionals. That is phenomenal.

And I will say that that sounds like a lot of work for per week. Well, we do it efficiently, kind of like what we're doing here. So it's all on Zoom. In your case, you're using a different platform, but we use a simple online platform.

And what we do for our clients is we say, okay, time block out two two-hour blocks per week. and then what we're going to do is we're going to get those interviews booked in there back to back we're shooting for about a 20-25 minute interview so we put them in 40 minute blocks right so there's the the guy's got a few minutes ahead of time to kind of review the person's application information jump on a call spend a few minutes just kind of breaking the ice 20 minutes for the interview and then five minutes at the end of the show to kind of transition into booking them into a discovery call and then, you know, a few minutes break after that.

So 40 minutes that would give you three potential interviews in a two hour time slot twice a week. So you can get four to six interviews booked in very, very efficiently. And again, because we're kind of a turnkey service, all they have to do is give us the link to the recording and everything else happens in the background. It sounds like a amazing way to do it.

I'll be honest. I've got this whole team behind me that is doing things to help get, as an example, this. Prepared, summarized, disseminated, cut into shorts, again, sent through social media. And there's a lot of work behind just doing a podcast.

You shouldn't just have some wild idea one day. Hey, you know what? I'm just going to start recording things. There's actually a science behind it.

Yeah. Well, you're so right, Nate. And I, different stats I hear, but the latest one I heard was that the average podcast doesn't make it past episode seven. So I think you're at like 150 plus episodes.

So thumbs up and congratulations to you and your team. You're way ahead of the game. so that the average podcast doesn't make it past episode seven before the host fizzles out and just quits because it is overwhelming if you're trying to do it all on your own right so again i set this system up for myself we got it pretty dialed in and then we started scaling it working with other clients doing all that doing all that nitpicky stuff behind the scenes that nobody really wants to do so yeah it's working working out really really well absolutely love Do you have like that golden story of, oh my God, this guy had the most amount of success and here's what happens.

Yeah. I've got one client that Matt had several successes. First big fun success for him was literally within the first month of him starting his podcast, we got him a guest booked in, a billion dollar fund manager. Okay.

so left to his own devices there no way in hell Matt would have met this guy right they were at very different levels but because Matt had a podcast and we reached out to this gentleman the gentleman was excited to be a guest on matt show so the cool thing was the billion dollar fund guy was really quite nervous about meeting matt it was like a complete turnaround because he had kind of matt up there like hey here's this big time podcast house because guess what the billionaire fund manager had never been invited to be on anybody's podcast before it was his very first time so matt put him at ease got him relaxed they had a great interview it went really really well the guy was just very happy they both happened to live in the same city so they started up i wouldn't say a super tight friendship or anything like that but they they had several last time i heard several coffee meetings and things are kind of nudging towards doing something together.

So that's, that's an example, not dollars and cents, but just an example of the kind of people you could reach by being a quote unquote media personality, even if nobody's ever heard of you because you've got your own show. Another fun thing, speaking of audiences, uh, in Matt's case, he had a gentleman reach out to him and he said, I've been listening to your show for a while. I love what you're doing. I'm looking at a real estate deal would you mind taking a look at it with me so matt took some time out and got on zoom with the guy and kind of went over the deal and it didn't look like a very good investment in matt's eyes so he just kind of pointed out some of the problems the guy said thank you very very much and uh well what would it be like working with you and investing with you so bottom line right out of the get-go started a relationship that gentleman ended up investing seventy thousand dollars in one of matt's syndications that's the show is not even designed for that but it happens it is designed for the the awareness and the authority like at the end of the day that's why anybody is out here doing these things to get their message out but it has to be in exactly as you're saying such a way that really you're speaking to well who you're speaking to is way more important as the audience rather than who's sitting right in front of you sometimes like yeah for me it's for me it's the other way around i really believe my my focus is always on who's on the other side of the screen that i'm talking to so the nice thing is nate you know you can use a podcast so many different ways you can do it the traditional way right which is where you're trying to interview really smart guys like yourself on your show make that connection oh no no you're not misconceptions but do do it that way and and grow an audience and make that connection make that relationship who knows you might end up doing business together some way or another in the future it's a great way to connect with your ideal prospect which is my main focus it's a great way to get booked in on other people's podcasts, which is kind of what we're doing here today, right?

So you can do what's called an interview swap. So you interview the person on your show, they interview you on their show, and it's a great way for you to grow your exposure that way. I've found it so much easier to get on other people's podcasts these days, having my own show, especially 1,200 episodes in now, than I did when I didn't have a show and I just trying to pitch myself as a guest. It makes perfect sense.

So you're the pro at this and you've got, man, way over a thousand episodes. How often do you generally recommend people actually release theirs? Like, it sounds like you're doing a daily and then some at times. Yeah, sometimes it is.

And then some, we got, we got almost 300 episodes behind for a while. So I is releasing three or four a day for a while, which is way too much. That's crazy. For our clients, and which is a manageable amount, if they're doing four or five interviews a week, it's a daily show close to Monday through Friday.

Okay. That makes sense. It also seems like a lot. So you are kind of targeting that 20, 25 minutes, really that timeframe.

So if you're doing four interviews a week. That really is almost every single day, something new that's available. That is fantastic. Well, it's great way to create content, right?

I mean, that was one of the reasons I started the podcast in the first place. I was getting sick and tired of trying to think up stuff to say. So when I have smart guys like you on the show, you do all the work because I just ask you a few questions and then you do the talking, you create the content for me. So it's a wonderful way to create content as well.

Right back at you. Thanks for creating some content. We'll really appreciate it. Anytime, mate, for sure.

Well, sounds good. If anybody wants to get a hold of you, because it does sound like this is an amazing potential direction, what's the easiest way to get a hold of you? Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect there.

And if you're interested in getting a free copy of my new book, which is called How to Get 20 Accredited investor meetings every month. Then we've got a website you can go to. It's 20accreditedinvestorsbook.com.

Again, that's the number 20accreditedinvestorsbook.com. Oh, Dave, really appreciate you joining today. Definitely opened eyes about, hey, been doing this for a while, but there's so much more potential than it sounds like anybody ever even thinks about, which is why we've got to work with people such as yourself, the pros, to make sure that we're doing things right.

I think you're doing things really, really right. Keep up the good work. And thank you so much for having me on your show, Nate. Thank you.

Appreciate you and everybody else that's listening. This is Nate Dodson, Capital Raising Show, and I definitely look forward to seeing you the next time around.