How to Automate Your Podcast Workflow to Save Time w/Joe Casabona

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (00:01.71)
I apologize. So you are a father and you are also parenting businesses, solopreneurs. Okay.

Joe Casbona (00:11.566)
Yes, yes. Yeah, so I left my agency job in 2017, about three months after my first was born, because I knew that I wanted to be available for my family, and I thought the best way to do that was to run my own business.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (00:32.482)
Yes, that makes sense. And it's funny because usually it's the mom who makes that decision, that conscious decision to sideline work for family. So that's very commendable. Yes, for sure. All right, so tell us how you help entrepreneurs. Like first of all, I...

Joe Casbona (00:49.368)
Thank you.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (00:58.271)
I want to ask what challenges you faced when you first decided that you were going to create this balance. Because that's like a tricky thing to do is balance life, family life and work life. So tell us what challenges you faced and how you overcame those challenges.

Joe Casbona (01:20.355)
Yeah, I think the first time I really faced a challenge because, you know, I mean, everyone's a great parent until they have kids, right? And so I had this idea that I'd be able to, you know, watch my daughter and while she napped, I would get work done and, you know, schedule, I could schedule meetings around that, but it didn't really work out. And so we hired a babysitter.

but that babysitter left in the summer and I realized that I was trying to do too much with my wife's a nurse, by the way. So, you know, she works three 12 hour shifts. so like we already have like a fairly flexible schedule, right? Like she she had gone to days already, so she wasn't working the night shift and she gets to kind of make her own schedule.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (02:00.483)
Yeah. huh.

What?

Joe Casbona (02:12.377)
But even so, like those working days were tough for me and I was in a mastermind group and my friend challenged me to do less. He said, what would what would your day look like if you did less? And what he meant was I should take on fewer projects. And what I heard was how can I automate everything except for my most crucial tasks? And so I started using tools like Zapier and IntegraMAT, now Make, to automate as much as I can.

And that worked out for a while. The biggest change though came in November 2020. So we were well into a pandemic. We had our second child at the time and my wife being a nurse was working even more and I was working a lot less. And I had a panic attack one day. I was just stressed by trying to run the household and keep my business afloat.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (02:58.938)
Bye.

Joe Casbona (03:11.393)
And the moment that really changed things for me was I'm sitting there in the kitchen on the floor crying and my three year old daughter comes up to me and says, it's okay, daddy. It's gonna be okay. And I thought, I should be taking care of you. So after that, I was like, you know what? Only the most crucial tasks.

So I hired a VA, I eliminated anything I didn't need to do, and about a year later we welcomed our third, and I was able to take a whole month off without really thinking about work and everything ran fine because of the systems I had put in place starting basically that day.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (03:57.2)
Bye.

Wow, okay. Wow, that's interesting and exciting at the same time, but out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, huh? Yes, yes. All right, so a lot of us, especially podcasters, find ourselves in these situations all the time, family or not. Tell me, what did you automate first? Like, what did you...

Joe Casbona (04:09.352)
Mm -hmm. Absolutely.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (04:28.94)
focus on to make your life easier so that we could learn what we could focus on first.

Joe Casbona (04:37.576)
Yeah, this is a really important question, right? Because I think it's going to be different for everybody. But the thing that I ended up automating first was my guest booking process. So, you know, I think I used a scheduling link for you, but a lot of podcasters will still do the kind of manual outreach, which is good. But then.

They do the back and forth of the time zone dance. Hey, what time works for you? I'll create a link that takes up so much time. It leaves room for error, right? Because we're in different time zones. You know, it was like a pretty easy conversion for us. But if I was interviewing somebody in Arizona in November.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (05:11.219)
Yes. Yeah.

Joe Casbona (05:28.306)
Right? That's really confusing because like Arizona doesn't change time. They change time zones. They don't change their clocks and there's a pardon. So like they have their own system, right? With a booking link like Calendly or cal .com, that does all the time zone math for you. But then to take it one step further, you can also.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (05:29.051)
huh. Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (05:36.904)
Yeah.

Joe Casbona (05:48.524)
use a tool like Zapier to send it to a planning document like Notion or Trello or Airtable or even Google Sheets so that you now have a list of all of your interviews and episodes so that you're never like, man, I have to publish an episode tomorrow and I don't have anything, right? Which was part of the problem I ran into in 2020.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (06:08.381)
Right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (06:12.744)
Mm -hmm.

Joe Casbona (06:13.209)
I'd be engrossed in the household stuff and trying to get clients. And then I'd realize, my gosh, I didn't schedule an interview for this week. And with my podcast planner now, which is powered by cal .com and Notion, I'm never in that situation. I always have at least four episodes in the tank.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (06:24.272)
Well.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (06:29.647)
Mm -hmm.

Joe Casbona (06:35.233)
which means that I could disappear for a month and my podcast still keeps going. that's thanks to my VA as well, but scheduling is the first thing that I tackled.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (06:44.994)
All right, I love it. So you use Zapier, you use cal .com, is that your own software or is that something?

Joe Casbona (06:57.069)
Cal .com is something my friend Sarah told me about. And it is basically a free version of Calendly. And it does everything that Calendly does. And I'm always suspect of totally free open source tools, right? Because they might disappear. But I looked into Cal .com's business model.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:02.788)
Okay.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:20.343)
All

Mm -hmm.

Joe Casbona (07:26.681)
And they really focus on making money through teams and enterprise, which means that if you're like a solo person and you don't need to do like team scheduling or anything like that, it's always going to be free. And it's got all of the features I needed and more. like if you're on the fence or you don't want to pay for Calendly or Savvy Cal or some other tool, I was able to switch over everything from Calendly to Cal .com in an afternoon.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:30.964)
Okay.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (07:36.801)
Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Joe Casbona (07:55.115)
And that includes a very complicated automation I have for routing my various calendars, which cal .com also works better with make .com or IntegroMAT than Calendly does. So it was like a win all around for me. I save money, I have better processes, and I get more features.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (08:01.021)
Right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (08:15.144)
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty awesome. And the people management is kind of, you know, it can get complicated at times. I know because I travel a lot. So, you know, that with the time zone and yeah, it's very hard. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that and hopefully it will help someone else because it certainly helped me. All right. So now I wanted to get into.

Joe Casbona (08:26.356)
Yeah.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (08:42.223)
you automated, but you also hired a VA. And I have to tell you, I did that a couple of times, I did not like not having control over my processes. So how do you navigate that as as a podcaster, especially?

Joe Casbona (09:04.748)
This is a great question and it's something I struggled with. It's why there's a gap in 2018 when my friend challenged me and 2020 when I had that panic attack, right? That I eventually hired a VA. I did so out of necessity, basically, right? And I don't want more, I don't want people to be in that situation where they, you know, that was like my first and only panic attack. It was very weird for me. And, you know, I didn't

want that to happen again. And so, I just pub actually this morning, like as we're talking, I published a piece on my website called the seven deadly sins of podcasting. and the, the biggest deadly sin, if you're unfamiliar with, Christianity or Catholic law or whatever, it's yeah. Likewise. it's gave me the idea. for those listening, if you're unfamiliar, pride,

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (09:56.34)
I'm a Christian, Yeah.

Joe Casbona (10:04.018)
is the deadliest sin, right? Because pride could lead to the other ones. And the pride version of the seven deadly sins of podcasting is doing everything yourself. Because you feel like nobody can do it as well as you, or you need to have control over the process.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (10:05.732)
Mmm.

Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (10:18.8)
Mmm.

Joe Casbona (10:27.837)
And what I would say there is, again, this was something I suffered from. I was a very prideful podcaster, is that if you put the right systems in place and hire the right VA, then they are basically doing exactly what you've set up, right? So I have a pretty complicated process for publishing my podcast because I'm publishing it on my podcast host.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (10:46.455)
Right.

Joe Casbona (10:55.283)
And then I'm separately publishing it on my WordPress website. And there were some custom features because I used to be a web developer and I just, recorded my process for my VA. I told her to transcribe it and write out the steps. And now we have a doc, an instructional document and she just follows that like to a T every time she publishes new episode. And I'll tell you what, like it's been four years since I've hired her.

When I have to publish an episode myself, right, if she's like away or sick or whatever, you know, maybe I like recorded like a bonus, like timely episode and I'm just going to publish it as soon as I'm done editing it. I can't really like I I'm confident she does it better than me now. So I think the thing to consider is like, yes, you have these processes in place and it's scary to let go a little bit,

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (11:47.689)
Wow.

Joe Casbona (11:55.788)
If you work and communicate with your VA and you put, you know, it's a handbook or SOPs, standard operating procedures, and they follow those, then your business is running without you or your podcast is running without you. And that's where I tell people I can save them 12 hours per week on their podcast. That is those two things that we just talked about, like booking guests and having a VA.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:02.216)
Huh?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:15.356)
Right.

Joe Casbona (12:22.239)
like do the publishing side of things and like gather she gathers my show notes for me. Those are the two biggest impact areas for me because you're no longer rushing to get an episode out and then publishing it and creating the artwork yourself and everything like that. Like that's all my VA does all

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:22.461)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:26.321)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:32.742)
Mmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (12:43.023)
Right. Wow, that makes so much sense the way you explain it. And not wanting to be a prideful Christian is a good motivation. Yeah.

Joe Casbona (12:52.172)
Yes, my kids have definitely helped me be less prideful and that's translated into my business,

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (13:02.906)
Yeah, they

Yeah, they can surely pull you down a peg or two. Yeah. All right, okay, so you recorded your system, your procedure, and then have the VA type it out. And I guess that allowed her to assimilate herself with your system, right?

Joe Casbona (13:28.67)
Yeah, that's exactly right. And this is, this was a great tip. I got from a guest on my podcast. because if you just write out the steps as you remember them, you know, there's some value to that, but there's way more value to showing and telling, right? You might make an assumption about something that your VA is not familiar with. so by recording myself doing the process and narrating what I'm doing,

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (13:45.272)
Yes.

Joe Casbona (13:57.075)
she's able to hear what I'm doing and see what I'm doing. And then if I miss something, which I've done before, she knows what to ask. Hey, it looks like when you said pick the category, I was over here, but I don't see it there. okay, I need to give you better access or whatever, right? Or I'm not seeing this part. okay, it's because I'm an admin and you're not an admin. Let me make you an admin, right?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (14:18.121)
Right, right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (14:26.133)
Got it.

Joe Casbona (14:26.91)
Yeah, so like the, yeah, the recording part and then having her transcribe it and then write out the steps, right? Because now she is seeing, she's hearing, and she's writing it. So I'm really confident by the end of that, she fully understands the task.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (14:39.668)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (14:47.379)
Yes, yes, yeah, that makes sense. I love it, I haven't had it, I've heard, know, I or VA, but I've never heard the why, and that is the why and the how.

because the how is very important because you're like, okay, I know I'll probably save time, but how do I do it? Just look so muddled, that whole situation. And she's not, she's gonna mess up my podcast, this kind of thing. So I'm really grateful for you who've experienced it and able to share it with us. So thank you.

Joe Casbona (15:20.8)
Yeah, my pleasure. And I mean, I've made the mistakes too, right? Like when I hired my VA, she, her name's Ana. I'm just going to refer to her as Ana from now on. I, you know, I would give her the thing about she's based in the Philippines, right? And so, you know, she's a very good like entry level VA. There are some VA's who are more like operations managers, right? But for her,

the task needs really clear inputs and really clear outputs. I once tasked her with just the the task was find me conferences to speak at. That's real bad, right? Because I didn't include what I want to talk about, the type or size of conferences, the location, am I willing to travel? And so that task went poorly and that was on me because it was really unclear.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (15:53.19)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (16:16.506)
Yes.

Joe Casbona (16:17.335)
once I start once I understood like okay she she need or like va's at her level need to know what are the inputs and what should it look like at the end and do are there clear instructions to get from inputs to outputs those three things have just made things run like super smoothly

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (16:35.628)
Yes.

Joe Casbona (16:41.907)
And it's, really grateful for her. I've like, continually give her raises because I don't want her to leave me.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (16:46.965)
Yeah, that's good incentive. And it's funny you should mention how you make sure that the instruction you're giving are clear and precise so that you can give you the results you're looking for. Because it just reminds me I'm working on some stuff with prompt engineering and that's exactly what it sounds like, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Joe Casbona (17:11.262)
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's the same thing for automation, right? It's just a little bit different. But, you know, with automation, like there needs to be clear inputs and there need to be clear outputs, right? This is something I talked about on my YouTube channel a couple of weeks ago. It's called automating your processes using the PER method. P -E -R, right?

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (17:20.756)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (17:38.764)
Mmm. Okay.

Joe Casbona (17:41.235)
where P is perform. You do the task, you record and document it, and you write down the inputs and the outputs. Then you evaluate that task. You ask yourself, can only I do this task? Are the inputs clear? Are the outputs clear? And I can give you a link to this video too, if you want to include it in the show notes. Can another person do it? Can a computer do

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (18:02.088)
Yes, please.

Joe Casbona (18:09.17)
And do you want to do it? This is important, right? Cause like I still reach out to guests to have them on my show. I don't, I'm not the only person who can do that. And some might argue that others can do it better than me, but because my business is helping podcasters and solopreneurs, I want to be the first point of contact for those people because it is also a networking opportunity for me. And so that's really important to me.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (18:19.146)
Bye.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (18:32.528)
Yes.

Yeah.

Joe Casbona (18:39.347)
And it's about building, I should say it's building the relationship. It's not just like, I don't want to have like, you know, some assistant reach out and be like, hi, Joe wants to have you on his show. I want to be like, hey, I want to have you on my show for these reasons. So that's where you evaluate. And then if the inputs and outputs are clear, if you're not the only person who can do it, which by the way, you're the only person who could do it if it requires your voice or perspective, like those are basically the only times you personally need to do something.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (18:42.364)
Mm -hmm.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (18:47.74)
Bye.

Joe Casbona (19:09.577)
I mean, or it requires access. Like my VA doesn't have access to my email, right? I'm just like not ready to give that up. Or like my bank account. Like that's just like. So like if it requires access, your voice or your perspective, those are the things that only you can do. So if if you're not the only one who can do it and the inputs and outputs are clear, you can are remove it from your process.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:15.288)
Okay. Right.

Joe Casbona (19:39.951)
And if a computer can do it, you're connecting basically two applications, right? Calendly to Notion or cal .com to Notion. Google Sheets to Airtable, something like that, Riverside to Google Calendar. If you're not just connecting two or three apps really, then a person should probably do it. And that's when

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:47.394)
Yeah.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (19:55.426)
Yes.

Joe Casbona (20:07.412)
take the recording from when you were performing it and give that to an assistant so that they can do

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (20:13.364)
Yes, yes. Okay, makes sense. Lots there to unpack and you know, very, very valuable stuff. I'm grateful to you. So I'm going to ask you, Jo, what are you grateful for today?

Joe Casbona (20:27.46)
I am grateful for family. I found out shortly before this recording that my babysitter is on vacation. I didn't realize that. I guess she texted us a couple of weeks ago and we forgot. And so I didn't have childcare this morning and my father -in -law basically dropped what he was doing to pick up my kids so that I could have them so I could work today. So I'm very grateful for that.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (20:50.72)
Yeah. Yeah.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (20:55.272)
Yes, thank you, thank you for sharing. And I'm gonna ask you to, because this show I believe is for aspiring podcasters, people who wanna be podcasters, or people who are struggling with the whole process of being a podcaster. So can you give us two or three tips that will help us better, to better serve our audience and to make life

less stressful for us in this space.

Joe Casbona (21:29.897)
Absolutely. So the first tip is have a mission statement for your podcast. I think if we're, you know, I've got the seven deadly sins on the mind because I just spent like a whole week like writing it and creating the graphics. But Gluttony is saying my show is for everyone. You can't serve anyone if you're trying to serve everyone. And so I think your mission statement answers three questions. Who

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (21:53.812)
Man.

Joe Casbona (21:58.88)
do I serve? What is their problem? How do I help them solve that problem? If you keep those three questions in mind, you will reach the right audience and your podcast will grow, which is one of the things that people struggle with. So that's number one. Number two is edit your podcast. I think a lot of people think that listeners want raw, unedited interviews because it seems

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (22:05.648)
Yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (22:12.83)
Mm -hmm.

Joe Casbona (22:27.309)
The bigger podcasters do that, but good editing for interviews like that, you can't really tell that it's been edited, right? I think like the, it's like how a baseball player makes catching a fly ball look super easy, even though it's hard to track that ball and then run to the spot and make sure you catch it. Right. so I think doing a little bit of editing

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (22:36.838)
All right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (22:50.34)
Mm -hmm.

Joe Casbona (22:55.526)
leveling or like, you know, making everything sound the same volume, editing out things that don't lend itself to helping your audience solve the problem and cleaning up the audio a little bit with like and with tools like Descript, it's really easy to do that now. So I think editing is number two. And I would say number three is

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (23:16.246)
Yes.

Joe Casbona (23:27.279)
Think about this per method that I talked about, right? Because if you try to do everything, you're going to get overwhelmed and then you're going to either burn out or you're going to miss a week and then you're going to miss two weeks and you're like, well, I only missed two weeks, but then eventually you'll stop podcasting. And I assume you started your podcast for a reason you don't want to stop. So I think like editing is one of the easiest things to hire out.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (23:44.62)
huh. Yes.

Joe Casbona (23:55.786)
You can find a good affordable editor, but if you don't want to hire out that part, then look at some automation tools to take things off of your plate. I mean, that's easier said than done. That's exactly what I help people with. But if you at least start thinking about your processes, then you'll start to see, well, I don't really need to do this, right? I can cut that out or I can send that to somebody else or I can use a tool to automatically create the graphics.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (24:03.639)
Mm -hmm.

Joe Casbona (24:25.421)
and then you're on your way to saving 12 hours per week.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (24:29.139)
Yeah, awesome. All right, before I let you go, after giving us all that information, tell us how we can get in touch with you and just briefly, I know you've peppered throughout advice and information, but tell us briefly what you do, how you can help us and then tell us how to get in touch with you. Yeah, yeah.

Joe Casbona (24:53.238)
Yeah, that's a great question. So right after I get off of this recording, I am going to create create a page called podcast workflows dot com slash Jen. That's Jen with two ends like the host. And there will be a free resource. It will be my podcast planners and automation database so that if you need inspiration or you just want to copy that template, you have that right.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (25:04.724)
Okay, yes.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (25:20.796)
Okay.

Joe Casbona (25:21.325)
Also on that page will be like my social media handles and other ways to get in touch. The way that I help people basically three ways. The first and best way I think to get started with me is doing a podcast growth audit where I apply a nine point framework to your podcast and I give you ways to grow your show. I've seen people, I applied this framework myself and grew my show 20%.

I've seen people increase their viewership by 50 % or their YouTube watch time by a bunch of hours. So I know this works. People have been really happy with the results. So that's the first way is a podcast audit. And then I also do one -on -one coaching where you can hire me to walk through your process and I'll help you build automations and we'll cut out a bunch of things that you don't need.

will improve your content and will get your podcast up and running as smoothly as possible.

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (26:29.723)
We all need some help in that area, but okay. All

Joe Casbona (26:32.846)
Yeah, and you know, I will say I don't want to soapbox here too much, but I'm I've I've been podcasting for 12 years now and I've made all of the mistakes so You know, like I said earlier, my goal is to help people not make those mistakes, right? Like start off like, you know stay on the right path instead of uh, You know learn from my failures, I guess Yeah

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (26:59.658)
Okay, awesome. Thank you, Joe Casabona for coming and talking to us and tools of the podcast trade. I really appreciate you.

Joe Casbona (27:07.692)
My pleasure. Thanks so much for being here. This was great. So thank you

J. Rosemarie (Jenn) (27:10.2)
Yeah, awesome.