Unscripted Small Business

Victoria Bennion has been booking experts onto podcasts since 2019 through The Best Podcast Guest Booking Agency, and on Unscripted Small Business she explains why her clients stop chasing Oprah and Joe Rogan. A niche show puts you in front of "the people that need to hear from you," the host is often your ideal client or your next referral, and most hosts hand you a backlink in the show notes. She tells the story of the leadership author whose one-sheet got read as a resume and turned into a webinar contract, a conference keynote and 300 book sales, and the coach whose cats landed her a client. Victoria also covers why you do not need expensive equipment, why her team added a speech coach and a practice interview on their own podcast after an author showed up with a script, why she still pitches by hand while hosts drown in AI-written pitches, and who should hold off on podcast guesting until they have a solid offer. Jeremy adds why the interview is the information gain for a small business site.

Victoria's "you don't need to be on Oprah" line now anchors Jeremy's essay Podcasting Is the Fastest SEO Channel Right Now, and her point about the host being the real prize runs through Why Podcasting Sits at the Center of My SEO Practice on SEO Arcade.

Victoria trained in journalism, moved into communications, and went freelance in marketing when her daughter was born. A course on supporting authors mentioned podcast guesting, a business owner in the course's Facebook group asked for help getting booked, and she put her hand up. Six years on she runs a team, a speech coach and a practice-interview show from Dorset, with most of her clients in the US and Canada. Jeremy's full recap, with the transcript, is at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Victoria is also on Facebook. Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Richard Gearhart founded Gearhart Law 20 years ago and is about to sign its 5,000th intellectual property client, and on Unscripted Small Business he explains what AI just broke. Copyright attaches the moment you create the work, "the best deal in intellectual property law ever," but registering it is what unlocks statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per occurrence. AI cannot be an author and AI cannot be an inventor, so using AI as a tool is fine and the trap is scope, because the problems start "when AI starts adding ideas to the invention that the inventor never contemplated." Richard also covers Getty demand letters, why a trade secret dies the moment it can be reverse engineered, and the expert-witness case where LLM-drafted work got turned over in discovery and killed the case.

Richard's episode is about rules that decide who owns a thing. Copyright attaches the moment you make it. AI cannot be an author. A patent needs a human inventor. None of that is obvious and none of it is natural. Somebody wrote it down, and they wrote it down because a harm had already happened to someone.

That is worth sitting with, because it is not unique to intellectual property.

Take oxygen. Ordinary air is about 21% oxygen. OSHA draws its line at 19.5% - below that the atmosphere is officially oxygen-deficient and you are not supposed to send anyone into it unprotected. That is a gap of one and a half percentage points, and your body gives you nothing to notice it by. Oxygen depletion has no smell, no color and no taste. Nitrogen, argon and helium do not poison anybody. They simply take up the room the oxygen used to occupy. PureAire's breakdown of oxygen depletion and how to prevent it notes that a few breaths of depleted air is enough for impaired cognition and coordination, rapid breathing, and in the worst case unconsciousness or death.

Impaired cognition is the cruel detail there. The first thing the hazard takes is the judgement you would need to get yourself out of it.

So the regulation does the work your senses cannot. Someone had to choose 19.5%, write it into law and enforce it, because you cannot feel the difference between air that is fine and air that will kill you. A room full of leaked nitrogen looks exactly like a room.

That is the same shape as Richard's argument about AI and authorship. The law insists a human be the author, and it says so because "who made this" stopped being something you could settle by looking at it. In both cases the rule stands in for a sense we do not have.

The difference is only in what it costs to get it wrong. Miss the copyright question and you lose the ability to enforce something you believed you owned. Miss the oxygen question and somebody does not walk out of the room.

Both are consumer protection. One is just slower.

Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten.

Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Phil Crowley spent 30 years in the Johnson & Johnson Law Department, about seven of them as chief FDA regulatory counsel for J&J's biotech and high-technology products, before he started Crowley Law for life sciences and technology founders. He was a research physicist first: Stevens Institute, then the PhD program in experimental physics at Harvard, working on superconductivity.

He opens with the client who wanted to save money and pulled an operating agreement off the internet for his LLC. It was not an operating agreement. His partner was supposed to run the distilling side of a new vodka brand and instead got, in Phil's words, a little bit too fond of the juice and slept at the plant. There was no legal way to remove him, the partner sued first, and the client nearly lost the $50,000 he had put in.

His book is Avoid Startup Failure: Learn the Top Ten Causes of Failure for Technology Startups and How to Turn Them to Your Advantage, on Amazon in softcover, Kindle, Audible, and Spanish softcover. The Amazon link is an affiliate link.

More from Phil on the business divorce problem and on handling a partnership dispute, and there is more on scaling without losing your core over at SEO Arcade.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews with small business owners at Unscripted Small Business.

Brett Schklar has asked eighteen hundred chief executives how AI adoption is actually going, and the honest answer is badly. He founded AI First Leadership, runs a fractional marketing firm with thirty-plus contractors and no employees, and wrote AI Without the BS after hearing the same failures on repeat.

The opening move of the workshops he runs with chief executives is to take the thing they have been selling off the table. If raw analytical capability is now abundant and cheap, nobody is paying you for being clever.

What is left is judgement, which is knowing which of the available answers is the right one here, and wisdom, which is knowing which question was worth asking. Neither compresses well.

The reassurance and the warning arrive together. The unit being automated is the task, not the role, which means most jobs survive in a changed shape.

The exception is the role that was only ever a stack of tasks with a person on top managing them. Brett is direct that those people are the ones who should be worried, and that the fix is to move up into deciding rather than doing.

He cites the framing that easy tasks become automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible. That third clause is where the opportunity actually is and where almost nobody is looking.

The reason it works as a framework is that it stops the conversation being technical. A leader who is strong on two and blind on the third will make predictable mistakes, and you can name which ones.

For a small business he does not recommend transformation. He recommends compounding. One per cent better each week, across the whole team, is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output by the end of the year.

The point of framing it that way is that nobody has to be convinced of anything dramatic. It is a small enough ask to survive contact with a busy week, which is the only test that matters.

His concrete example is request-for-proposal responses going from thirty or forty hours down to about two. That is not a strategy, it is a Tuesday, and it is where most of the available value sits.

His advice is counter-intuitive and correct. Customer service is the last place to deploy this, because it is where a bad answer costs you a relationship rather than a draft.

It is also the best place once you have it right, for exactly the same reason. The stakes that make it dangerous are the stakes that make it valuable.

The structural warning attached is about ownership. AI strategy handed to the IT function becomes a procurement exercise, and procurement exercises do not change how a business operates.

Owners tend to weigh generated content as a quality question. Brett weighs it as a trust question, which is a larger number.

Publishing volume that says nothing is not neutral. It teaches the reader that your name is attached to filler, and that lesson is expensive to unteach. There is a longer version of that argument in what actually works in LLM search.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

His site is brettschklar.com. Hear more small business conversations at Unscripted Small Business.

Schklar, Brett. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “AI Isn’t Taking Your Job. It’s Taking Your Tasks.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/ai-isnt-taking-your-job-its-taking-your-tasks

Matthew Pohl, founder of The ReWild Group in Denver, Colorado, joins host Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted Small Business to explain why a business that feels stuck usually is not broken. It is in a stage, and it is being run with the rulebook from the last one.

Matthew and his wife ran a company together for twelve years before they had it valued. The number disappointed them. The business had been flat for roughly a decade and they could not explain why. He found a researcher who had mapped how companies change as they grow, started running the business by that map, and three years later revenue had tripled, the team had gone from about eight people to 40, and they sold for ten times the year-twelve valuation.

The stages have nothing to do with how old a business is or how much it sells. They track headcount, because headcount is what drives complexity.

"It's rather the number of people in the business that really are the highest correlation to this level of complexity." — Matthew Pohl

"So if you have one to 10 employees, you're in stage one. If you have 11 to 19, you're in stage two. Stage three is from 20 to 34 employees. And it continues to go up until you hit stage seven." — Matthew Pohl

Stage seven runs to 350 employees. Stage three has a name that tells an owner exactly what it will demand of them: the delegation stage.

Stage two, the ramp-up stage, covers 11 to 19 employees. Five challenges show up there so reliably that the ReWild team calls them the classic challenges:

Hiring is hard at that point for a structural reason rather than a personal one: you are doubling the size of the organisation you had in stage one, and you have not hired that many people before.

Businesses get stuck "primarily because they are dealing with stage specific challenges and they're trying to use an old rule book." — Matthew Pohl

Most growth frameworks ask for a valuation, a consultant, or a five-year plan before they tell you anything. This one asks for your employee count. That is the whole entry price.

Guest: Matthew Pohl, The ReWild Group · rewildgroup.com

Read the full episode recap and takeaways

Sherri Langburt bootstrapped BabbleBoxx into an Inc. 500 influencer marketing agency that productizes campaigns for every kind of business — not just the beauty brands everyone pictures. She argues small local brands actually hold the biggest opportunity, and that the first hurdle is fear, not budget: not every creator costs a million dollars, and the real question is whether the influencer you pick can move a sale — because selling a pool is a lot harder than selling mascara.

Sherri walks through the pre-flight checks that decide whether a campaign converts or embarrasses you (inventory, store geos, landing pages, promo consistency), makes the case that AI cannot replace the human in the loop, and names the channels nobody is crowding: Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch and LinkedIn. Creators can pitch her team through the BabbleBoxx influencer sign-up.

Read the full recap: Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara

In this episode:

Connect with Sherri: babbleboxx.com · LinkedIn · case studies and trend reports via [email protected]

More episodes: Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Most companies buy AI backwards — they pick a platform before they have named what they are actually trying to fix. James Ernst of Core Order thinks that single inversion explains most of the disappointment small and mid-sized businesses feel about AI.

James spent eighteen years in marketing and public relations at agencies around the country, took a three-year detour running his own restaurant in Buffalo, and has spent the last two years working in AI full time. Core Order isn't an AI agency — he calls it a growth architecture firm, and the distinction is the whole argument.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Cameron Tope runs a several-hundred-door residential property management company in the Greater Houston area — and he operates it 100% remotely from San Diego. In his second visit to Unscripted Small Business, the founder of Emerson Property Management lays out why $20,000 a month in marketing is worthless if nobody answers the phone, how AI became a delegation tool rather than a magic box, and why he gives his entire playbook away on purpose.

Cameron is broker, owner, and founder of Emerson Property Management, serving several hundred owners across Greater Houston while running the whole operation from California. He started the company after he couldn't find a manager for his own rentals — while at risk of losing his oil-and-gas job and carrying a lot of debt — and has done it full-time for six years (and unofficially for over ten). Returning listeners first met him in Episode 1: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity.

"You spend $20,000 a month on marketing, but you don't have anybody answer the phone, and you get back to them two days later — you're just lighting money on fire." — Cameron Tope"We can give them the recipe, but it's not going to taste the same." — Cameron Tope"RTMs are kind of the first step towards AI. If you have a good process, you can delegate it." — Cameron Tope

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Find more episodes at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Richard Hickman spent his first career hunting Russian hackers as a digital-forensics consultant. Then he became a stepdad to five kids overnight, walked away from the on-call life, and started helping his wife build her coaching business — which accidentally turned into Piqued Consulting, a marketing agency built entirely for high-ticket coaches. In this episode he hands Jeremy Rivera the exact playbook: the CRM foundation that comes before ads, the pricing math that decides who he'll even work with, and why you should be writing your website for the AI that's reading it, not just the human.

Richard's ideal client is an established coach making around $20k/month who's stuck under a "referral ceiling" — great at the work, no predictable sales system. His agency's job is to install the foundation, dial in the offer, and only then turn on paid acquisition. Along the way he makes a sharp case for answer engine optimization (AEO), email marketing, and never betting your whole livelihood on a single platform.

"You need to be building your website to where it's not necessarily geared towards a human being visiting it, but an AI visiting it." — Richard Hickman"Who reads blogs anymore? AIs do. Perplexity reads your blog. ChatGPT reads your blog." — Richard Hickman"Social media is great, but don't rely on it, because it could go away in an instant and we've seen it happen." — Richard Hickman

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Every episode at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.