Inside the Smallbiz Brain

posted by David Wolf on Nov 2, 2007 | Comments (3) | Permalink | Trackback URL

I guess we all look for endeavors that make us feel good. Projects we can live with, long term if necessary. In the case of creating SmallbizAmerica, well, a personal convergence was certainly in play. Media, audio production, a passion for small business. But enough about me.

The whole model is decidedly not about me. It’s just being dreamed up by me, informed by how I’m wired, what I know, what I don’t know, and some experience. My idea was that SBA could serve the visitor, the listener, the podcaster, the subscriber, the entrepreneur and the budding smallbizzer. Storytelling, good interviews and a voice for a niche community that’s not heard from often enough.

The seed for Smallbiz America was the creation of our story telling series [now in AM terrestrial radio syndication] called, “Smallbiz Profiles”. The notion was that if I have survived this incredibly challenging bagel bakery turnaround project, then imagine how many stories like mine are out there, under the radar, and then imagine capturing these experiences and sharing them with smallbiz people everywhere. Stories can be very instructive on many levels.

I created “Smallbiz Profiles” by recording some basic interviews with a cross section of typical smallbiz people. I worked on the “what questions do I ask them” part of this, and finally landed on these key areas: why do this? what was the plan ? what were the challenges? what successes do you still celebrate? what advice might do you offer to other smallbizzers. Once I had done several interviews, I was faced with editing this raw audio into a format that could be placed in broadcast. Funny, at the time I was really interested in terrestrial radio, even though I was aware of streaming audio via broadband and its advances.

I worked with a syndication rep to develop this interview format into a vignette series that could be broadcast. We eventually arrived at 60 seconds of content. The spot insert allocation would be 30 seconds for the moment. As I started to edit, I discovered that not only did the questions fit into the time frame, but that they weren’t needed at all. I found that I could arrange the snippets of their answers into stories of a kind. The questions became an “off-camera” seed.

Once we had completed several demo episodes of Smallbiz Profiles, it was time to start shopping for radio station affiliates.

More to Come.

FILED IN: Blog, Branding, Entrepreneurship, Management, New Thinking, Podcast, Starting Your Business