The Secret To Reaching 800 Episodes: Fix Whatever Causes Burnout

What does it take to publish 800 podcast episodes without burning out? Turns out, it's treating your podcast like a media supply chain. 

We’re talking about the biggest lessons from Buzzsprout podcaster Tom Raftery’s fine-tuned podcast workflow built through years of consistent publishing. In his blog, he explains why consistency comes from removing friction, how a foolproof pre-recording process can protect your time and energy, and why the right tools and responsive customer support matter most when something goes wrong.

Read Tom's blog

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Transcript

Jordan 0:00

Okay, so for this quick cast, I wanted to talk about a blog that was shared internally in the company chat. It was written by Tom Raftery, who is a Buzzsprout podcaster and a listener of Buzzcast. Yeah, super fan. He's a host of Resilient Supply Chain and Climate Confident. And he wrote about his podcasting workflow after 800 episodes.

Kevin 0:23

Yeah, 800 episodes. What an accomplishment. That's that's massive.

Jordan 0:26

So, I mean, his podcast is about like supply chain, and you know, you you got to make sure that everything's like running really smoothly. And it's so interesting reading through his process of podcasting and also his like philosophy of podcasting, like when it's working through that lens of like supply chain. And he kind of like taught ties it all in. So he he wrote, I think of the workflow as a media supply chain. They're inputs, quality gates, dependencies, production steps, packaging, hosting, publishing, feedback loops, and a constant search for the next bottleneck.

Alban 1:00

I love it. That's great. Yeah.

Jordan 1:03

So some of my favorite takeaways from his experience, I read through this, I'm gonna link to it in the show notes. I highly recommend that you read through it. It's it's so well written. Um, Tom's got a great voice in his writing. Um, but one of the things I really enjoyed, uh, he said, consistency happens when you remove as many pain points as possible. And I think a lot of us kind of assume that we're going to be consistent with our podcasting. We're gonna stay consistent just through like pure grit. And he's saying, like, no, actually, that's a good way to burn out. And the best way to continue podcasting and make sure that you are continuing is by making it as easy as humanly possible on yourself.

Alban 1:42

Isn't almost everything like this? Like you can white knuckle your way through a few workouts, you can force yourself to a diet for a short period. You anything you're like, I really want to do this, I'm going to do it, you can do it for a couple days. And it's when anything goes slightly off plan that you're like, oh gosh, my two workouts every day plan actually is going to be kind of tough when we're on vacation. I have no clue how to solve this, and it all unravels. And like podcasting fits into this group, like you can force yourself to do a few episodes, no matter what. You know, you're no matter how bad the supply chain, the media supply chain is. But at some point, you need to have like smoothed it out so that it kind of is happening naturally, like the equivalent of laying out the gym clothes the night before, so that you can just wake up and go rather than having to like figure it out on the fly every single day.

Jordan 2:38

One of the things that he mentioned is a bottleneck that I've personally been encountering in my podcasting experience too, which is probably why it resonated so much with me. And I included it in this list. He said that your pre-record needs to be like completely bulletproof, foolproof. And if you do that, that will ensure that the rest of the podcast runs so much more smoothly. And so he says, like, you need to make sure that you're vetting your guests, you know, and making sure that they're a good guest for your podcast. You need to always be prepared. So make sure that you have like backups and contingencies. Um, he says to include like recording details and the calendar invite, which I love. This is a big one, coaching guests on audio and video. The thing is, is I've encountered, especially with uh our podcast, Happy to Help, the people that we have on as guests, they're not podcasters, like the vast majority of the time. They're not. They don't have experience with that. They might be doing like some Zoom calls and consultancy kind of things. And I think that Tom uh often encounters the same thing where the people he's interviewing for his podcast, like they're not podcasters. And so he has to kind of like coach them and get them comfortable on the camera. And so one of the things that really helps with that is doing like a pre-recording warmup, which I love doing this. It's it's great to um just kind of like chat with people about something that they're passionate with and it makes them a little bit more comfortable in front of the camera and they feel like, okay, I'm at ease, like I can do this interview now because this is a friendly encounter. But I've I've totally had things where I wish that I did the painful thing and had like a tough conversation with a guest, you know, because there's been so many times where I kind of like white knuckle through a recording, even though I know it doesn't sound quite right. And I'm like, I could, I know I can fix it in post. Like, I know I can, but really that makes so much extra work for me in the long run. And then I start like dreading editing this episode, right?

Kevin 4:39

It's it's a great point. The the stuff that he's listing here, I think, is the stuff that when it goes wrong, it's not insurmountable stuff. Like if you have a guest on your show and they're uncomfortable on camera, like you can grind through that, but it's removing a lot of the joy and it's removing a lot of the polish that you work so hard for in your episodes. If you have a guest who's like talk talking off topic or they're whatever, like you see a lighting change that they could make that would be an easy adjustment, but now you're into the recording and you don't want to mess up with stuff right in the middle of the recording. These are little things that steal the joy and the craft, or maybe what makes your show unique and different. And uh getting it right up front, I think, is a great protection measure to protect your joy, to protect your time, and protect sort of maybe the brand or the style of your podcast. And so I I I love this as a checklist, and I think everyone could have their own version of that for sure.

Alban 5:33

I like these little things like recording details are in the calendar invite. And I think I'm always the stickler for these in my own life, where I'm like, okay, we're gonna use the same Google Meet Room every time, no matter what. And over time, like you just it gets a little bit easier because you don't sit there and go, hey guys, you got the got a room, got a link for us? It's always the same room. And so everybody knows where they're how to get there. The room is always in the calendar invite. The calendar is always the same time unless we want to change it. And each of those, like it's already decided, just takes one of the things off the table. So that when there inevitably are I'm running 10 minutes late, it's not the third inconvenience, it's just the one tiny one that doesn't really matter.

Jordan 6:20

Yeah, that's a huge one. And especially because you want to keep the energy up during the recording. And so if your pre-recording is painful, it's gonna be like, oh gosh, okay, it took us forever to get in here. We had to do like troubleshooting, and you know, I had to ask for this thing like a million times and they didn't respond. And now I'm not excited about the recording. And so, yeah, there's there's so many advantages to making sure that everything runs really smoothly. All right. So I I have a third one here that I love. And this is, I mean, I don't want to say this is like my favorite part, but it's pretty close to my favorite part. So and you'll see why. Tom talked about how instead of being like loyal to like your tool set, ask yourself like what part of the workflow keeps breaking and improve your tool stack from there. And in this point, he talks about how important it is that a company has support. And so he talks about how he uses BuzzSprout to host both of the podcasts. And he said that support is easy to undervalue until something breaks, which is so true.

Alban 7:26

All right, can I tell a story on this point? I think I'm a huge Airbnb advocate. And it's always so smooth. You can find a great place. I come from a big family, so if we all get together, it we need a big house. And Airbnb is the best way to do it. And we've stayed in tons of Airbnbs over the years to the point that like we don't look for hotels, we look for Airbnbs. And so when I went to this wedding a couple weeks ago, we got a really bad Airbnb. And it wasn't Airbnb's fault, but there were a bunch of bugs in it and it was bad. So we just message him and go, hey, we you know, we can't stay here, it violates the policies, we got a hotel. And then the support was so bad for a few days. And I was talking to my wife, and I was like, I'm not upset that we lost the money from this Airbnb. If that's the result, what I'll be really upset about is that we'll lose Airbnb because there's no way I can do this again. Like I can't commit to, you know, if we went on a big vacation to Italy or something, like you can't get an Airbnb under that scenario if they don't solve this. And I'm like lamenting this and going, I don't think they're gonna pull it out. And then like the next day, my wife's like, let me step in, I'll I'll email them. And she sends them one message and she got the right person because they go, Oh, I'm sorry, our mistake, we refunded it, everything's taken care of, tickets closed, and it had been like five days. I was like, Oh, wow. It's good to get that money back. But the big part was as soon as you lose your trust in a product, it's like gone. It and it stinks for everybody, stinks for the company, but it also stinks as the user because then you don't feel like even if it works 99% of the time, I'm just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Does that make sense?

Jordan 9:12

Yeah, there's a lot of products that I have stopped using because it's impossible to find their like support email. You'll you'll go through all the help articles and they have like a ton of like unhelpful help articles that maybe are like outdated. It was for like previous versions or something like that. And then you're like trying to find, like, okay, no, how do I just like talk to somebody? And then the chat just like keeps sending you to like these help articles that weren't helpful in the first place, and like you just never reach a person. And those kind of things can definitely sour my relationship with a company big time.

Alban 9:48

Yeah, there's something too you you just want to know at the end of the day, even if the AI chat bot was really smart and the help article was well written and everything helped. Like, I kind of want to just know at the end of the day, at the end of the path, I can go to a person and say, Do you understand? Like this stinks, even if you're not gonna give me the money back or you can't solve this bug or whatever it is. Like, you kind of still want that human connection in there.

Jordan 10:12

And I think that Tom, like in his writing, he really reflects that. He said that when you publish every week, support is part of the resilience architecture. And if an upload fails, a feed behaves strangely, or metadata issue appears just before publication, you do not want to shout into a ticketing void. You want people who understand podcasting and respond with clarity. And he says BuzzSprout's own customer support podcast, happy to help, is a useful signal here. It is hosted by Priscilla Brooke, Buzzsprout's head of podcaster success, and focuses on making customer support better. And a company willing to talk publicly about support usually understands that support is part of the product. And I love this so much because I really truly feel in my heart that our support, the support that Buzzbro has is a feature. It is absolutely part of the product. It is like one of like the most shiny things that we have. I just love that one of our customers feels that, like that, they understand that and they see it.

Kevin 11:15

Yeah, we could we could do a whole episode on support. I think we have done partial episodes at least. Priscilla's been on the podcast a few times, but it's it's it's such a difficult balance to strike between you want every customer to experience your support at some level, especially when it's really good and you really care and you love connecting with people and interacting with them. Again, but you and then again, you don't necessarily want them to because that means something probably they're struggling somewhere. Something went wrong. The majority of our support tickets are not necessarily because something is broken. It's usually the result of a misunderstanding or um I don't know how to do something. And I love that when people get to interact with us, you know, just because they want clarity around something or they want to do something better. I hate it when it's the result of something breaking. But either way, uh, I love it when people get to experience our support because our team, we only hire people who really do care about helping people succeed. That's why we renamed the team from support to success. Um, again, I don't want to go on and on about it, but I I do love the fact that Tom wrote about that. And it is a good part or an important part of being able to run a successful and consistent production is making sure you have a team around you and not necessarily meaning like a co-host and a producer, but also like the software that you're using, the team behind those products being a part of your team.

Alban 12:29

One thing I would add to this, Jordan, that I really like from this episode was he treats the finished episode as a metadata factory. And the idea is at the end of the episode, you're trying to make sure that you're not losing value after you record. You've got titles, guest profiles, transcripts, thumbnails, all these extra pieces. You need to make sure that your flow of your podcast is easy enough that you have energy at the end to still optimize the episode somewhat. Yeah. And make sure you're writing a title and you're not just burned out, so you don't you just skip all these extra steps that he's basically optimized it so there's still energy at the moment of publication. And so there's this one quote if I can send us off with one quote from Tom. Heroics are a poor operating model. If a publishing system depends on repeated last-minute rescue missions, it's not a system, it's theater with a deadline. Surprise for me is that podcasting has taught me as much about supply chains as supply chains have taught me about podcasting. Flow matters, bottlenecks matter, quality control matters, consistency matters, support matters, resilience is built before the disruption arrives.

Jordan 13:41

I love it. I I told you, like it, the writing in this whole blog is just amazing. It's it's a really fun read. I think that there's a lot of wisdom in here from Tom's experience, you know, in supply chain, and then also as a podcaster for 800 episodes, which is incredibly impressive. And so I highly recommend that you read it. I will leave a link to this in the show notes. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.