The Localist with Carrie Rollwagen

What do you do when a business you love goes up for sale? If you're Jimmy Truong, you buy it, and then you try very hard not to change it.

Jimmy was last on The Localist before June Coffee had a storefront. Five years later, June is one of the most popular coffee shops in Birmingham. This year, Jimmy also bought Daily Edition in West Homewood, and, with three partners, Last Call Baking Co., the James Beard-nominated bakery around the corner from June. Neither deal came from a five-year plan. Both came from friendships (and one phone call he didn't expect).

Carrie and Jimmy talk about why he kept the staff, recipes, and look of both businesses, and how he learned that Daily Edition cannot run like June. Jimmy explains how a design choice at June lowered the barrier between baristas and guests, why staff retention starts with listening, and how his first SBA loan compared with funding June on personal debt. They also talk about blueberry coffee, a boba experiment that lasted two batches, his friendship with Tim from Punch Love Coffee, and the new June location coming to Knox Square in Hoover.

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

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• June Coffee

• Daily Edition

• Last Call Baking Co.

• Jimmy's first Localist episode: Transitioning from Wholesale to Brick-and-Mortar with June Roasters

• Word of Mouth Podcast: The Godfather of Birmingham Coffee

• Punch Love Coffee

• Ladybird Taco

• The Localist: The Magic behind Ladybird Taco

• ETC Jewelry

• Zephyr Barber

• The Collins Bar

• El Barrio

• Paramount

• Birmingham Tattoo Company

• Juniper

• Helen

• Ohm Jiu Jitsu

• Alabama Twisters

Jimmy Truong is the owner of June Coffee, a roaster and coffee shop in downtown Birmingham. This year he also took over Daily Edition in West Homewood and, with partners, Last Call Baking Co.

• Jimmy on Instagram

• June Coffee

• June Coffee on Instagram

• Daily Edition on Instagram

• Last Call Baking Co. on Instagram

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

Is there a secret trick to beating the algorithm? Laine White says the only hacks that last are the ones that serve your audience first.

In this Localist Lab session, recorded live in front of a room full of small business owners, Carrie welcomes Laine White, a marketing consultant representing Uptick Marketing. Laine explains why Google, Meta, and AI assistants all reward the same thing: a good experience for real people. She starts with a story about gaming Instagram as a high schooler in 2012, and watching those 5,000 followers disappear.

Then she gets practical. Laine walks through why saves and shares now matter more than likes, how to rewrite your FAQs so ChatGPT and other LLMs can actually cite them, and the three factors Google uses to rank a Google Business Profile. She shares a three-question test for any hack someone tries to sell you, plus five things you can do before next week. In the Q&A, she covers Google Business Profiles for businesses with dozens of locations, where FAQs belong on your website, and who to follow to keep up with algorithm changes.

If social media and search feel like a game you don't know the rules to, this session gives you the rules and the reasons behind them.

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

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• "How to Use AI Without the Internet Turning on You" with Laine White

• Ladybird Taco

• Breakout Games Birmingham

• Laine on Instagram

• StoryBrand

• Uptick Marketing Learning Center

• Luke Richey on LinkedIn

• Adam Mosseri on Instagram

• Annie-Mai Hodge on LinkedIn

• Girl Power Marketing on Instagram

• Greater Birmingham Humane Society

Laine White is a marketing consultant in Birmingham. She works with small businesses on social media, websites, and search, and shares deep dives on marketing on Instagram.

• Laine on Instagram

• Uptick Marketing on Instagram

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

The Birmingham Greek Festival runs for three days. The people who put it on work on it all year.

This week Carrie is doing something a little different. Instead of sitting down with a small business, she talks with Agatha Pihakis, who chairs takeout and drive-through at the Birmingham Greek Festival at Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral downtown. The festival started in the late 1960s as a pastry booth at Birmingham's Festival of Arts, moved into the church gym as a bazaar, and now serves close to 40,000 people across a closed-off city block. It is a charity run entirely by volunteers, and as Agatha puts it, it is like opening a business for three days.

Agatha and Carrie get into the logistics. It takes a full week just to set up. The pastries are all made by hand over the summer, including 25,000 pieces of baklava and 600 full pans of pastitsio. Tommy, the festival's numbers guy, keeps an Excel workbook with five years of sales so they know how much salad to order and when to call a broker for an emergency delivery. Agatha photographs every table and every plug before teardown, because a year later nobody remembers how it was set up. They pull point-of-sale numbers at 2:30 each afternoon so the kitchen knows what to put in the oven. And the drive-through she and Tommy started about 30 years ago now runs three lanes and moves more food than the walk-up line does.

They also talk about the hard years, because the festival has been through several. It opened 10 days after Sept. 11, hoping only to break even, and sold out of everything. It donated its proceeds after Hurricane Katrina and had its biggest volunteer turnout ever. COVID pushed the team to pre-package the pastries and put up a tent across the street, and they kept both changes because both worked.

If you run an event, a fundraiser, or a business that has to pull off something big a few times a year, this one is full of practical answers on planning, record keeping, on-the-job training, and what to do when the tornado sirens go off with 1,000 people in the street. And if you just love the Greek festival, Agatha has the parking tip and the one thing she says not to miss.

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

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• Birmingham Greek Festival

• Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral

• Food for Our Journey

• Life on Wheels

• Firehouse Shelter (Firehouse Ministries)

• The Salvation Army of Birmingham

• American Red Cross of Alabama

• Children's of Alabama

• Magic Moments

• Ronald McDonald House Charities of Alabama

• Boutwell Auditorium

• Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex (BJCC)

• Infomedia

Agatha Pihakis chairs takeout and drive-through for the Birmingham Greek Festival, a job she has held for about 25 years, and she is a past chairman of the festival itself. She is a lifelong member of Holy Trinity-Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Cathedral in downtown Birmingham.

• Birmingham Greek Festival

• Birmingham Greek Festival on Instagram

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

This week on The Localist, Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Leah Drury and Lindsey Miller Neal, the co-founders of Battle Republic. Battle Republic is a fitness boxing studio with locations in Homewood, Hoover, and now Tuscaloosa. Leah played basketball at Alabama and coached in the WNBA. Lindsey spent 14 years at Zoe's Kitchen, where she was acting CFO while the company scaled to 240 restaurants, and she now runs an accounting business for small business owners. They have been friends since they were kids growing up, and they are refreshingly honest about what it takes to run a company with a friend.

The conversation gets into how they hire, which starts with character and gets to kettlebell technique later. They talk about building community in a dark room where nobody is talking, why they don't require members to own gloves, and what the red light and the blue light at the end of class are actually doing. They also get into growth: what COVID taught them a year into the business, why you cannot pay the bills at your first location with the money from your second one, and how they decide when to trust the data and when to trust their gut.

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube.

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• Mpire Concepts

• Zoe's Kitchen

• The Stable in Greensboro

• Vuori at The Summit

• "Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara

• "Atomic Habits" by James Clear

• Church Street Coffee and Books

• Infomedia

Leah Drury and Lindsey Miller Neal are the co-founders of Battle Republic, a fitness boxing studio with locations in Homewood, Hoover, and Tuscaloosa. Leah played basketball at the University of Alabama and coached in the WNBA. Lindsey spent 14 years at Zoe's Kitchen, where she was acting CFO, and she also runs an accounting business for small business owners.

• Battle Republic

• Battle Republic on Instagram

• Battle Republic on LinkedIn

• Battle Republic Tuscaloosa on Instagram

• Battle Republic intro offer: two weeks for $59

• Lindsey Miller Neal on LinkedIn

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

This is a live recording from Localist Lab, the in-person version of The Localist, where specialists come in to talk to small business owners about the work everyone's trying to figure out. This month Carrie Rollwagen was the speaker, talking about the thing that finally made AI click for her: using AI well isn't a tech skill, it's a management skill. Anyone who has trained an intern, written an SOP, or told somebody how to cover their desk while they were out already has most of what they need.

The session walks through how to build an AI skill start to finish, first using Infomedia's new hire Emery as the comparison and then using the podcast as the working example. It covers the 70-30 rule for deciding what to hand off, why a skill is really just a standard operating procedure written in plain English, why the context window works like a meeting whiteboard, and the eight things a good set of instructions has to include. Carrie also shows the skills she actually uses to make The Localist: a researcher, an interview writer, a title writer, a social media writer, and a strategic advisor skill that the others pull from.

There's also a story about an espresso machine named Richard that will convince you to read your AI's research before you sit down at a microphone. Then the audience asks questions on whether skills are just fancy form letters, whether you need to pay for an AI account, and what actually happens to your data once you put it into a chatbot.

If AI still feels overwhelming, or if you've built a skill and it keeps handing you mediocre work, this session gives you a real process for fixing it.

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

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• Infomedia

• Uptick Marketing

• Tempo Websites

• Caravan (AI training)

• Infomedia AI training and upcoming events

• 1Password

• LastPass

• Trattoria ZaZa

• "The AI Daily Brief" podcast

• "The Localist" book by Carrie Rollwagen

• Laine White on local influencer marketing (next Localist Lab speaker)

• Saturn in Avondale

Carrie Rollwagen is Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning at Infomedia and the host of The Localist. She is a former bookstore owner, a career writer, and the author of "The Localist: Think Independent, Buy Local, and Reclaim the American Dream."

• carrierollwagen.com

• Carrie on Instagram

• Carrie on LinkedIn

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

How to Use AI Without the Internet Turning on You | Laine White of Uptick Marketing

AI can save your small business a lot of time. It can also get you dragged into your own comment section. This week Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Laine White, Head of Client Strategy at Uptick Marketing, to figure out where the line actually is. Laine uses AI every day, and she still has real ethical concerns about it, which is exactly why she is the right person to ask. Her rule is simple: use AI to plan, strategize, organize, and analyze. If you are using it to make the content people actually see, either make sure nobody can tell, or be ready for the fallout.

We get into why people come for small businesses harder than they come for big corporations, how one angry comment thread turns into a Reddit thread and then into what your neighbor thinks about your business, and what 'burstiness' has to do with why AI captions read as bland. Laine breaks down what captions actually need on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok, why she does not want you generating images at all right now, how a brand kit makes AI design look less like AI, and why ChatGPT keeps quietly editing your photos and giving you away.

She also answers the question every business owner is afraid to ask: you already posted the AI thing, people are mad, now what? Laine walks through what to say, what not to say, and why saying nothing is the worst option you have.

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• Uptick Marketing

• Infomedia

• Uncle G's Pizza

• Uncle G's Pizza on Instagram

• Saturn Birmingham

• Cala Coffee

• Cember Studio

• Hattie O'Hara on Instagram

• The Localist episode with Hattie O'Hara

• Laine's first Localist episode: A Practical Guide to Influencer Marketing

• DJI Osmo Pocket 3 Creator Combo

• The Birmingham subreddit

Laine White is Head of Client Strategy at Uptick Marketing, the sister company of Infomedia. She works with small businesses on social media, websites, and strategy, and she has a psychology background that shows up in how she thinks about reputation and word of mouth.

• Uptick Marketing

• Laine on Instagram

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

In this episode of The Localist, Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Malissa Davis, the founder of Best You Ever, a Birmingham-based personal styling and image consulting firm. Malissa spent nearly 10 years at Nordstrom before launching her own business, and now works with clients in Birmingham and virtually across the United States. Fun fact: Malissa is also the mom of Taylor Davis, the showrunner for The Localist. If you've ever seen Taylor on camera and thought she looked great, that is Malissa's work.

Malissa opens with how she starts every client relationship: tell me your story. She talks about why building trust in a dressing room feels a little like being an unlicensed therapist, and what she learned in a decade at Nordstrom that shaped how she works today. She walks through her closet cleanout process (take out anything that does not fit, including the clothes you keep to shame yourself into losing weight), her style assessment quiz, and why her four-hour shopping cap is really about respecting your capacity.

The second half is about the business side of things. Malissa gets into why she specializes in curves and tall women, why tailoring is worth the extra $15 every time, how she styles for speaking events and camera, and the SOS package for special occasions. She also shares one of her favorite client stories: styling a Biggest Loser finalist for the show finale. If you are trying to build a personal brand, style yourself for a speaking event, or just tired of your closet saying no to you every morning, this episode is a warm, practical guide. Watch on YouTube _______________________________________

• Best You Ever

• Nordstrom

• Infomedia

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

In this episode of The Localist, Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Austin Senseman and Robert Hill, the co-founders of Caravan. Caravan is a Birmingham-based AI training company that teaches business owners and their teams how to actually use tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Austin is also co-founder of Birmingham AI, the 501(c)(3) that puts on free monthly AI events at Innovation Depot, and is a Claude Ambassador for Birmingham. Infomedia hired Caravan for a full team training earlier this year, and Infomedia also sells the class to clients.

Austin and Robert talk about how Caravan started with a listening tour of 20 Birmingham businesses at the end of last year, and how the answer they kept hearing was not build me a product, it was teach me how to use these tools. They get into why they think Claude Code was the moment agentic AI became real for non-technical professionals, why every AI class is also a little bit of therapy, and why they update the curriculum every single week to keep up with what the tools can do.

The second half is where the conversation goes deeper. Carrie, Austin and Robert all get honest about the ethics of AI, the anxiety it creates, and the reality of being a writer or a small business owner trying to navigate this moment. They talk about why anger is a common emotional home for people right now, why disengaging from AI often means leaving the conversation to bad actors, and why Robert thinks 2027 is going to get weird. They also talk about James Clear's identity framework, why buying local-ish beats buying local perfectly, and why Austin's favorite AI story is a Birmingham pastor who uses AI to save four hours a week on sermons so he can visit more people in hospice. If you are grappling with AI in your own work, this is a rare honest conversation.

Watch on YouTube _______________________________________

• Caravan

• Birmingham AI

• Infomedia

• Claude

• Claude Code

• Anthropic

• Innovation Depot

• Hardware Park

• Sloss Tech

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here

What actually makes a photo shoot go well, and what makes an expensive one go sideways?

In this episode of The Localist, Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Katey Beck and Taylor Davis, producers at Infomedia Studios. Katey is a chef turned producer. Taylor is a film major from Auburn with a background in commercial acting and wedding videography. Together they run photo and video shoots for small businesses and brands in Birmingham, and Carrie regularly goes to them for the questions she cannot answer herself: what to wear on camera, how not to freeze up on video, whether her Zoom background looks weird.

Katey and Taylor talk about what really goes into a shoot. Why one hour of production equals one minute of finished content. Why a full day realistically nets you 80 photos and a 90 second video, not a highlight reel. Why hospitality matters more than gear. Why you should never book a photographer without asking about lighting, focus and their ability to direct posing. When you actually need a stylist on set, and why food is the one category you always do. How to make people comfortable on camera when they are not used to being there.

The second half is a practical guide for anyone shooting on their own. What a shot list is and why the whole team needs one. Why brand shoots often fail because the photos were not planned against the content they would live in. Why you should not wear the same blazer in every frame. How to build a good background at your desk. Why the iPhone is a legitimate tool in 2026, and how to hold your exposure to get better footage in any light. Katey and Taylor also answer listener questions on why video is so much harder than photos, whether there really is a good side of your face, and what budget you actually need to hire a producer.

Watch on YouTube _______________________________________

• Infomedia Studios

• Infomedia

• Uptick Marketing

• @pinklanternbhm

• Spindle Photography (Kelly Cummings)

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

• Contact Infomedia

Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

• See upcoming events and register

Want more small business tips from Carrie? Sign up for her newsletter.

• Sign up here